A Private Life review – Jodie Foster is a sleuthing shrink in French-language Hitchcockian mystery
Rebecca Zlotowski serves up a genial, preposterous psychological mystery caper: the tale of an American psychoanalyst in Paris, watchably played by Jodie Foster in elegant French, who suspects that a patient who reportedly committed suicide was actually murdered. Zlotowski is perhaps channelling Hitchcock or De Palma, or even late-period Woody Allen – or maybe Zlotowski has, like so many of us, fallen under the comedy spell of Only Murders in the Building on TV and fancied the idea of bringing its vibe to Paris and transforming the mood – slightly – into something more serious.
Foster is classy shrink Lilian Steiner, stunned at the news that her client Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) has taken her own life. She is also furiously confronted by Paula's grieving widower Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who believes she bears some responsibility for her death, having prescribed antidepressants which were apparently taken in overdose. But a tense visit from Paula's daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) leads her to suspect foul play. Soon, she and her tolerant ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) are putting people under surveillance and generally staking them out; then someone breaks into Lilian's private office and steals the minidiscs on which she records analysis sessions.
Things get even weirder: Lilian, stressed out and drinking, pays a visit to a cheesy hypnotherapist (Sophie Guillemin) who regresses her into some kind of past-life dream state in which she and Paula were lovers, playing in the string section of a Paris orchestra during the Nazi occupation and one of the Hitler militia is her estranged son Julien (Vincent Lacoste). Huh? Lilian's own analyst, incidentally, is played in cameo by iconic documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman, and he angers her by raising the painful question of Lilian's mother – a plot point that is not pursued and may have been lost in the edit.
But what is the point of these bizarre Nazi orchestra scenes with Simon conducting, his baton transformed into a revolver? They are striking and amusing (and maybe show the influence of 40s movies such as Nightmare Alley or The Seventh Veil). Do they reveal Lilian's concern with antisemitism? She certainly objects to a bigoted wisecrack from the hypnotherapist about Freud. Her ex-husband is an ophthalmologist who has treated her for problems with tear-ducts; again, it could signify something about Lilian's problems with compassion, or perhaps it's just the pretext for a bit of high-spirited comedy, a style that Foster carries off rather well, despite being hardly a natural.
Vie Privée canters along to a faintly silly, slightly anticlimactic conclusion and audiences might have been expecting a bigger and more sensational twist. Yet Foster's natural charisma sells it.
Vie Privée (Private Life) screened at the Cannes film festival.
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