Jodie Foster delivers in a Hitchcock-inspired film that starts fresh but ends up anticlimactic.
“A Private Life” is a French thriller with an American leading actress and a Hitchcock concept. It regards a psychiatrist whose patient may or may not have been murdered, and must play detective. The American actress is Jodie Foster, who is very fluent in French, and there are some moments when she speaks English.
Co-written and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, we’re off to a good start with the premise and the game of detective, and then we have to get a conclusion that’s more anticlimactic than ingenious. And I guess that’s what I find most disappointing in this well-meaning, but ineffective murder mystery. That is if it is really a murder mystery, but we’ll get to that in a second.
The opening credits does a nice job of having Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” playing. So we can easily tell “A Private Life” is going to be fun and stylish, especially when that same song appears later in the movie with Foster driving and smoldering at the screen. And there are other moments worthy of the adjectives, if only the movie kept that up and drew us more into whatever lives were being introduced to.
Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist living in Paris and learning that one of her clients Paula (Virginie Efira) has passed away. Her husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric) blames the doctor for her death based on the medicine she prescribed to her, and her daughter Valerie (Luana Bajrami) is always showing up at her office unannounced and looking for facts. But Lilian tells her that’s doctor-patient-confidentiality.
Nobody knows for sure how Paula died, but Valerie does suggest her mother may have killed herself. But given some recent evidence, Lilian suspects that she may have been murdered. And suspects include the husband and daughter.
In a season when Will Arnett and Laura Dern play a married couple on the verge of divorce and reconnecting again in “Is This Thing On?,” we also have Lillian receiving help from her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) on her case. He is an ophthalmologist, so we start off with a surprise appointment, then, they have a little dinner which ends with them laughing and kissing, and finally, they go through with the mysteries. Maybe they should do zoom calls with the leads of “Only Murders in the Building.”
Visiting her hypnotherapist (Sophie Guillemin), we see Lillian seeing a vision of herself and Paula in an orchestra pit with cellos, as Simon is leading the musicians, and because it’s set during WWII, SS officers are in the audience. And they’re all Jewish performers on the verge of deportation. And these scenes also suggest that he is a bad guy, and Lillian and Paula were lovers with a child on the way.
We all know that Foster specializes in playing detectives, as wisely demonstrated in “The Silence of the Lambs” and “True Detective: Night Country,” and I wanted to like “A Private Life” because of them. She’s the main attraction of this film, because of how she eases into her character’s life and how she adapts in both languages. The best moment is when she comes across a little boy when she breaks into Simon’s home and tells him he’s in a dream and that she is a nice lady who helps kids get through storms. It almost feels like a French actress is playing Lillian at this point.
But the problem with this movie is that it doesn’t really delve deep into the mystery as much it should. It’s hard to tell if it was meant to be solved, and it loses the spirit to engage us in whatever game the main heroine finds herself in. And we also get tiring scenes regarding her estranged son Julien, especially during a birthday scene that has to end with drinking and arguments, even though she does tells him and her ex-husband what she saw during her hypnotic sessions. Whatever is going on may be the source of her own problems, but it’s not really valid.
There’s a lot to like in “A Private Life,” but not enough to recommend.
In Select Theaters This Friday
