“She had this in her hand before she died.”
Since Jodie Foster has done it all and done it well, the question remains: What will she do next? A Private Life is the only real answer. What else could an actress of Foster’s esteem do but lead a film (in French, no less) about the darkness of the human mind that exists within someone who is meant to both understand and heal it in others? Mixing elements of noir, international surrealism, dark comedy, and compelling introspection, A Private Life is about the secret worlds we create and escape to when no one (not even our conscious selves) is looking. It’s a provocative, fascinating film, the fear that keeps someone from existing in reality, and the strength it sometimes takes to live in the present.
In A Private Life, Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist living in Paris. A divorced mother with a grown son (Vincent Lacoste), Lilian finds herself growing disenchanted with her profession as she’s finding it more and more difficult to connect with her clients. When a longtime patient named Paula (Virginie Efira) suddenly dies, it shakes Lilian to her core. Although Paula’s death has been ruled a suicide (supposedly due to the mix of medications Lilian prescribed), she starts to believe her patient was murdered. Suspicious behavior from both Paula’s husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), and daughter Valerie (Luana Bajrami) sends Lilian on a quest to find out the truth.
Director Rebecca Zlotowski’s film is a typical noir in a lot of ways. It’s set in the fall in Paris (a well-loved noir backdrop) and features a dead mysterious woman at its center. There are scattered clues left behind, and even a sequence that takes place on a rain-soaked night where Lilian collects an important piece of evidence. The film’s physical space plays up to the genre as well, with Lillian’s sprawling apartment/office proving the perfect setting for many key moments to play out in. At the center of it is a seemingly simplistic mystery, the kind that’s fun to absorb, not to mention incredibly well-shot. There couldn’t have been a more intriguing start to the film than the opening image of a woman’s arm lying in the snow, its fingers slightly moving. After a tense moment at Paula’s shiva ceremony, during which Simon orders Lilian to leave, the questions start to show. Did Paula really kill herself using the medication she was prescribed? Is Simon responsible for her death? Was it actually Lilian who caused Paula’s death by prescribing medication she might not have been able to handle? If so, did Lilian subconsciously know that? As the questions mount, so too does Lilian’s paranoia, especially after her car is vandalized and her office ransacked. Is someone messing with Lilian, or is this all in her head? The film’s incredible score and cinematography amp up the paranoia and the questions in their own way until we’re not even so sure ourselves.
It’s the personal aspects of A Private Life that surprise and deepen the film beyond that of a typical mystery/thriller. The complications and flaws that start to arise in Lilian’s life as a result of Paula’s death makes this just as much of a character study as it is a noir. Foster’s face feels so right for a film like this, with its genre elements and the moments where Lilian is being forced to confront herself. It helps that the actress looks like she belongs in that world, both in the French landscape and in the realm of psychiatric medicine. Enough traits are given to Lilian to make her feel like a real person. Lilian speaks English when she’s talking to herself or recording notes in her tape recorder. She has a somewhat co-dependent relationship with her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), and an odd aversion she has to spending time with her son and grandson. A Private Life takes a very interesting detour when Lilian has to transport into another life by way of hypnosis, one which sees her in an alternate reality where Paula is still alive. The mental spiral that Lilian is sent on as a result of the hypnosis and Paula’s death is a dizzying and captivating one, where it’s now the psychiatrist trying to hold onto her own sanity as her world slowly starts to unravel. It’s here, in the midst of Lilian trying to decipher whether the fantasy is the reality, where the film’s true tension lies.
That tension is also the reason Foster’s performance is as captivating as it is. It’s so great seeing the double Oscar winner take on a role that draws on silent, introspective human moments to guide the performance instead of large chunks of dialogue. Indeed, Foster’s most compelling times in A Private Life come from her silence, her looks of worry, frustration, curiosity, and a need for answers. Those scenes only intensify the more haunted Lilian becomes in the wake of Paula’s death. When Foster is tasked with a dialogue-heavy scene, she obviously scores as well. A moment at her son’s dinner table where Lilian is trying to describe her hypnosis and dreams, her child’s role in them, and how it explains their relationship, is one of the best scenes she’s had in years and should go down as one of the standout moments of her entire career.
It feels right that Foster is playing an American living in Paris rather than trying to portray a French woman. The fact that Lilian is American gives the character of Lilian an alienated outsider quality that’s essential for the journey A Private Life sends her on. It’s a journey where she must dig through the false memories and imagined scenarios to find herself. The balance between the surreal side and the Paris reality is what makes the movie so intoxicating, especially when the two start to blend in Lilian’s head. Ultimately, the crux of A Private Life goes from a need to discover the truth about what happened to Paula to Lilian’s own need for her life to finally make sense again, or perhaps, for the first time.
