It’s no secret that Jodie Foster is one of America’s finest actors. She won two Best Actress Oscars, near back-to-back, for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). And, in the last few years, she has taken on diverse roles and done some of her best work, specifically in her Golden Globe winning roles in both The Mauritanian (2021) and the anthology series, True Detective: Night Country (2024) as well as her Oscar-nominated performance in Nyad (2023).
The thesp is on a roll. And her arresting portrayal of an American psychiatrist living in Paris who embroils herself in a murder investigation—her first French-language performance—proves she’s working at the top of her game.
In A Private Life, Foster plays Dr. Lilian Steiner, a neurotic psychoanalyst who lives a very structured life, until she discovers that Paula (Virginie Efira) one of her female patients has committed suicide. She cannot fathom that, after treating the woman for years, she missed any signs of her even thinking of taking her life. And she quickly grows to believe that Paula was actually murdered. So, with the help of her devoted ex-husband, Gabriel (Daneil Auteuil), Lilian goes about investigating the possible crime, even when warned by the police not to.
She starts by crashing her dead patient’s Shiva, where Paula’s husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), immediately throws her out. So, she suspects him. She also suspects Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luana Bajrami), who inherited quite a large sum of money, along with her father, from a recently deceased aunt.
And there is a subplot involving Lilian’s semi-estranged son Julian (Vincent Lacoste) who feels that his mother never has any time for him or his newborn son.
In addition, Lilian also finds herself visiting a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) and discovering she may have been in a past life that involved Paula, as her lover, Simon as an assassin, her son Julian, as an informant, and, well, Nazis.
There’s a lot going on in Rebecca Zlotowski’s bizarre yet infectious narrative (which she wrote with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé), and it doesn’t all work all the time, but the film is never dull, and the director blends a number of genres (thriller, mystery, romance, comedy) quite expertly. This is not a movie where you look for gritty realism, most of it lives at a heightened level, although Foster’s rich, nuanced performance grounds it when necessary. But the film’s erratic shifts, also, nicely mirror Lilian’s neuroses, suspicions and feelings of paranoia.
Foster and Auteuil have wonderful chemistry and their Miss Marple-ing often elicits moments of hilarity as well as few truly suspenseful scenes.
And there is a particular scene, near the end, where Lilian thinks she’s figured out why she’s always been a distant mother that is quite devastating and played so well by Foster, Auteuil and Lacoste.
The denouement proves semi-satisfying, but it’s Foster’s presence that stays with you. Her Lilian is definitely not the kind of therapist I’d want to visit, and I wouldn’t want her for a mother, but I sure would like to spend some quality time with her investigating a murder!
A Sony Pictures Classics release.
A Private Life had its World Premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and is part of the Spotlight section at the New York Film Festival.
