“You went through her trash?” someone asks the heroine of A Private Life.
“It’s my job,” she replies bitterly.
She’s a psychiatrist. For much of its length, the French-language film feels like a hatchet piece against the profession; you might almost wonder if some anti-psychiatric partisan like Tom Cruise was the executive producer. (He wasn’t.)
Said heroine is Lilian (Jodie Foster), a divorced expat American with a high-end practice in Paris. Her patients are beginning to mutiny, however, quitting or suing after years of expensive therapy sessions that now seem useless to them. She comes across like a cold fish, inattentive to her patients, distant from her grown son (Vincent Lacoste), indifferent to her grandchild.
Then one of her patients, Paula (Virginia Efira), dies, seemingly by her own hand, with medication Lilian prescribed. The widower (Mathieu Amalric) angrily kicks Lilian out of the funeral. Tears start streaming constantly down her cheeks, but she’s grown so numb she can’t believe it’s from grief, so she goes to consult her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), an ophthalmologist, to see if she has an eye condition.
As this unfolds A Private Life (or Vie Privée in its native tongue) shifts into a low-key Hitchcockian mystery with a sly edge of stinging, acerbic comedy. Especially after an encounter with Paula’s daughter (Luana Bajrami), Lilian simply can’t accept that her patient took her own life, so she begins to probe the case, and to suspect the husband is the culprit. Meanwhile her romantic relationship with Gabriel is renewed, much to chagrin of the reproachful son. There’s even a possibly supernatural past-lives strand to the story, linking it to the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski from a script she wrote with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, A Private Life generates a tense and queasily funny atmosphere. The story about the film, of course, is Foster, not only because she plays her role almost entirely in French and never, to my ear at least, sounds strained doing it. She’s also impressively bleak and emotionally constricted. It’s one of her best performances.
Compelling as Foster is, though, her costar Auteuil may be credited with saving the movie. While the other characters are trapped in their resentments, he allows his Gabriel to fall back in love with his wife, and his direct, straightforward passion rouses Lillian from her defeated stupor, and gives A Private Life a reason to live.
