A Private Life: Jodie Foster anchors this elegant but underpowered Parisian mystery
Rebecca Zlotowski’s psychological thriller flirts with darker territory before settling into a slight caper, enlivened by the wit and warmth of Jodie Foster’s rapport with Daniel Auteuil.
A Private Life is the kind of flimsy genre exercise that needs a strong star performance to keep it on course. Thankfully. Rebecca Zlotowski has cast Jodie Foster at the centre of the film, and it’s hard to imagine a stronger linchpin. Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist living in Paris who, we quickly surmise. has been doing this work for a long time. perhaps too long. She barely seems to listen to her patients’ woes, allowing her ever-present Dictaphone to do the work for her, and her emotions are regimented to such a degree that she is brusque and distant even around her own family.
Lilian needs a jolt to rouse her from this apathy, and when the jolt comes it’s violent. The death of her longtime patient Paula (Virginie Efira) is a shock to the system, and this resolutely unemotional professional suddenly finds tears streaming uncontrollably from her eyes. Did she miss the signs? Could she have done more to help Paula? To satisfy her own curiosity, and perhaps to assuage a sense of responsibility, Lilian turns amateur sleuth. Before long, she begins to suspect that this was no suicide.
It’s hard to know how seriously were meant to be taking all of this. At times, A Private Life probes potentially rich psychological territory, touching on a suppressed memory from Lilian’s childhood and suggesting complex feelings about her Jewish identity, but the film doesn’t explore any of this. Instead, it veers away from darkness to play as an elegant caper: There’s plenty to enjoy on a surface level, thanks to Zlotowski’s sleek direction and the strong cast, but the convoluted mystery, cluttered with red herrings and signifiers, doesn’t grip, and even though Lilian is subjected to anonymous threatening calls and acts of vandalism, there is no real sense of danger: In truth, none of it seems to matter all that much in the end, and the resolution is deflatingly anticlimactic.
Perhaps it’s better to look at A Private Life through a slightly different lens, and to view it as an example of the comedy of remarriage subgenre, on which level it works in a much more satisfying way. Lilian’s ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) leaps at the chance to help her with this investigation, and his bright-eyed enthusiasm as he steals Amazon packages in search of clues is one of this pictures biggest treats. It’s a pleasure to watch these two great actors bounce off each other, as characters rediscovering the spark within themselves and in their relationship. Their chemistry is what lingers in the memory long after the trivialities of the plot have been forgotten.
► A Private Life is in UK cinemas 26 June.