Cinematically speaking, Jodie Foster can do, and has done, just about everything, including speak fluent French in three big-screen features: 1997’s little seen Stop Calling Me Baby!, 1984’s Claude Chabrol drama The Blood of Others, and 2004’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet wartime romance A Very Long Engagement.
A Private Life marks her fourth such effort, and the first in a leading role, and her anxious and agitated performance is the undisputed highlight of writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski’s film, which premieres at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
As a psychiatrist convinced that the death of a patient is in fact murder most foul, and that she’s the sole one who can deduce the killer, the Oscar winner is a frantic and frazzled mess of a physician, tumbling down a rabbit hole that, it increasingly appears, she herself has dug. The film around her never quite comes together, but Foster is more than enough reason to embark on this off-kilter investigation.
Sitting alone in her office at night, Lilian Steiner (Foster) visits an upstairs apartment to complain about the noise, only to be called a slur that, her phone’s translation app explains, can mean anything from “c---blocker” to “old biddy” to “pain in the a--.” She receives similarly harsh treatment from a patient who, unexpectedly materializing on her doorstep, tells her that he visited a hypnotist named Jessica Grangé (Sophie Guillemin) who spoke some gibberish that magically cured him of his smoking habit—a triumph that far exceeds any successes he’s had lying on Lilian’s couch.
As if this weren’t enough for one evening, Lilian once again fails to reach another patient, Paula (Virginie Efira), who’s been MIA for three sessions. The cause of that last rejection, however, arrives swiftly courtesy of a call from Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luana Bajrami), who informs her that her mother has unexpectedly died, and that the shrink should attend the following day’s services.
To reach Paula’s apartment necessitates ascending one of A Private Life’s numerous spiral staircases—a motif that intimates disorientation and deliberately recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. That connection is strengthened by the fact that the enigmatic Paula is a blonde, and that despite her demise, she continues to haunt Lilian.
At the memorial, Paula’s husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric) faints and, upon being tended to by Lilian, angrily banishes her from the premises. She’s equally unwelcome at the home of her son Julian (Vincent Lacoste), not because he doesn’t love her but because she’s distant and uncaring, as evidenced by her desire to flee the premises rather than hold her newborn grandson.
Her remoteness additionally extends to her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), an ophthalmologist whom she visits because, without warning, she’s begun uncontrollably crying.
Lilian is a woman apart, and she likes it that way, such that when Valérie gives her a note penned by Paula that she can’t decipher (and that’s scrawled on the back of the pill prescription Lilian wrote), she refuses to look at it. Instead, she opts to visit the hypnotist in the hope of curing her teary ailment.
What she gets is a hallucinatory reverie in which, after imagining herself as a fetus in her mother’s womb and navigating red staircases and transportive doorways, she becomes a cellist in a 1942 orchestra. There, Paula is another member of the classical-music troupe, Simon is the conductor (with a gun in his waistband), and other figures from her life are lurking on the periphery—as are Nazis intent on rounding them up.
Once finished, Jessica proclaims that this is proof of Lilian’s past life romance with Paula, and that the woman’s death is the cause of Lilian’s waterworks.
Despite being a rational doctor, Lilian accepts this explanation and, now convinced that she and Paula were soulmates, tries to figure out who killed her. There aren’t many suspects in A Private Life, so it takes little time for Lilian to fixate initially on Valérie and, later, on Simon, both of whom had an ostensible motive for doing the dirty deed.
A break-in at Lilian’s office results in the theft of the Minidisc recording of her last session with Paula. To make matters more perilous, she starts getting phone calls from anonymous individuals who never speak, and has her car doused in red paint that looks like blood—a gesture which implies that someone thinks she’s the real guilty party.
Zlotowski’s direction is as jagged and feverish as her script, whose momentum is interrupted by flashbacks (or are they false memories?) of Paula.
A Private Life’s narrative unevenness mirrors Lilian’s all-over-the-place mindset, although the story never quite achieves a consistent tone. Much of its sleuthing is suspense-free, and its stabs at humor are, with a couple of exceptions, lackluster.
Nonetheless, it occasionally strikes harmonious chords, most often via moments in which Lilian and Gabriel rekindle their (never fully extinguished) feelings for each other and, afterwards, partner up to deduce whether Lilian’s hunches about Valérie and Simon are legitimate or—as suggested by her own shrink Dr. Goldstein (legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman)—merely manifestations of her impulse toward avoidance.
Foster and Auteuil radiate the type of rich, comfortable chemistry that only comes from years of interlinked euphoria and heartache, and they’re so delightful that it’s too bad more of A Private Life’s early going isn’t spent with them together.
Even alone, however, Foster keeps the bumpy proceedings on course, evoking Lilian’s mounting mania as a symptom of the guilt she feels for abandoning her loved ones, patients, and the world.
With a nervous look in her eye (which magically stops tearing post-hypnosis), and body language that’s jumpy and erratic, the actress embodies her protagonist with a restlessness that’s married to unkindness; a dinner sequence in which she cruelly confesses that she could have loved Julian more is enough to turn one off to her permanently. That Foster keeps Lilian sympathetic, then, is a testament to her turn’s nimbleness.
Guilt and repentance, and unity and disconnection, are ultimately at the core of A Private Life, whose mystery turns out to be a Hitchcockian MacGuffin that’s simply the means by which Lilian comes to understand her failings and course-correct in time to save herself. Foster can’t totally do likewise for Zlotowski’s film, but she still makes it a unique riff on the classic whodunit.
