THE STORY – The renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner mounts a private investigation into the death of one of her patients, whom she is convinced has been murdered.
THE CAST – Jodie Foster, Virginie Efira, Daniel Auteuil, Mathieu Amalric & Vincent Lacoste
THE TEAM – Rebecca Zlotowski (Director/Writer), Anne Berest & Gaëlle Macé (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes
Psychiatrist Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) can’t stop crying. Although she protests that it’s merely overactive tear ducts, ever since she learned that Paula (Virginie Efira), a patient of nine years, has died, the tears keep endlessly streaming down her face. She’s dealing with a lot, including another patient demanding a refund for the last eight years of sessions. He initially came to Lilian for help quitting smoking, but he hadn’t been able to kick the habit until seeing a hypnotist. After one session with her, he threw away his cigarettes and hasn’t touched them since. Desperate to stop her tears from falling, she searches out this hypnotist and, while in a trance, gets catapulted to a past life in which she witnesses Paula getting shot by her husband (Mathieu Amalric). Insistent that she didn’t miss any suicidal tendencies in Paula, Lilian takes it upon herself to investigate her death as if it were a murder. But who killed her, and why?
Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life” wants to be a classical thriller in the Hitchcockian style. It even centers around a scene of hypnosis that could be straight out of the Master of Suspense’s “Spellbound,” but unlike that film’s trippy Dalí-directed visuals, the sequence here looks like any other dream sequence you’d see in any other film. The whole film looks great, with handsome production design and warm lighting that lend it an air of elegance, but it also has a placid quality to it that saps the film of any energy. It’s a middlebrow film with highbrow aspirations, jettisoning anything that could be too stylish or outré in favor of keeping things respectable.
Not that the film is ever in danger of not being respectable. This is not a lurid potboiler (although with that plot, it easily could have been), but a character study wearing the clothes of a murder mystery. As the central character, Foster shines, turning in her best performance in years. Lilian has steadfastly refused to look within herself for some time, shutting out her son (Vincent Lacoste) for months before this crisis drives her to engage in a messy post-divorce affair with her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil). Despite obviously having issues with listening to both her patients and loved ones, Lilian essentially embarks on this crusade to prove Paula was murdered because she’s looking for external solutions to her internal issues. When she goes to visit the hypnotist, she tells Lilian as much, saying that she can’t make her stop crying and urging her not to mistake skepticism for intelligence. Once Lilian gives herself over to it, she finds that not only is she able to go into a trance state, but her tears do stop. The brilliance of Foster’s masterfully nuanced performance is encapsulated in her reaction to this: she can’t stop wiping away the tears even though they’re not there, allowing her professional facade to crack just enough to register a flicker of surprise. Despite her eye doctor husband telling her that it will clear up on its own soon, you can feel Lilian’s need for the hypnosis to have worked deep in Foster’s soul, at least partly to absolve herself of any wrongdoing. At every turn, Foster complicates the character, painting a fascinating portrait of a woman who has forgotten how to listen, including to herself.
Foster’s work is strong enough that it papers over the film’s pacing issues, keeping the film watchable even though it’s slow going. There’s far too little propulsion to the narrative, and the tension goes slack until the big climax, which is far more intriguing than exciting and more noteworthy for the moral questions it poses than for the plot questions it answers. While that makes the film fascinating to think about afterward, it renders the bulk of the film a pretty staid watch. Without Foster, “A Private Life” wouldn’t have all that much to it. It’s compelling enough to be worth a watch with her, but you may have trouble remembering most of it the next day.
