Deploying her fluent French on screen for the first time since 2004’s A Very Long Engagement, Jodie Foster stars as Paris-based psychiatrist Lilian Steiner in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life. Lilian’s bourgeois ex-pat existence is troubled by little more than a noisy neighbor and a strange ophthalmological condition that affects her tear ducts, until the death of a patient, Paula (Virginie Efira), drags her into a murder mystery that forces her to question the cool rationality on which she seems to pride herself.
At the shiva for Paula, who apparently took an overdose of the anti-depressants she was prescribed, Lilian is confronted angrily by the woman’s grieving husband, Simon (Mathieu Almaric). A few days later, Paula and Simon’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajram), visits Lilian’s home and makes some comments that cast doubt on the official suicide narrative. Hoping to uncover the family’s secrets, as well as absolve her guilt over her failure to recognize the extent of Paula’s distress, Lilian enlists her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), on a convoluted quest that takes them around the city, and eventually out to Simon’s country retreat.
Initially resembling a relatively dark psychological drama, A Private Life increasingly settles into a gentler tone, with the playful back and forth between Lilian and Gabriel taking the edge off the heavy subject matter. Foster conveys a dogged obsessiveness that contrasts amusingly with Lilian’s bumbling, often misguided sleuthing, though it’s difficult to shake that she’s been saddled with a stock character: the shrink grappling with their own neuroses.
A few efforts are made to deepen the somewhat slight narrative here and there, particularly when Lilian returns to a hypnotherapist, Jessica (Sophie Guillemin), whom she had previously dismissed as a quack. Soon overcoming her clinical skepticism, Lilian experiences a kind of past-life regression, depicted as a goofy black-and-white dream sequence in what appears to be a Vichy-era opera house populated by Nazis. But the significance of this subconscious imagery ultimately remains unclear. Or maybe it’s just that the filmmakers’ interest in contending with anxiety about antisemitism within Lilian’s world comes across as oddly left field.
Despite this and several other unexpected digressions, including Lilian’s visits to her estranged son (Vincent Lacoste) and to a conference where she consults with her former analyst, portrayed by Frederick Wiseman in a brief cameo, the film zips along efficiently. The brisk pace does partly compensate for the essential banality of the central investigation, whose mechanics are never quite enticing or detailed enough to engage the emotions or imagination. And while the final revelations prove to be anticlimactic, at least A Private Life’s autumnal, Parisian atmosphere makes the journey to this unsatisfying denouement a cozy, mostly enjoyable one.
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