Film Review - A Private Life
Images courtesy of Transmission Films.
Jodie Foster is a Hollywood icon with a decade-spanning career that first saw her rise to prominence at twelve-years-old in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Since then, she’s done everything under the sun, but at sixty-three she’s still proving that she can surprise audiences. Take her latest film, A Private Life, as an example. Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it marks Foster’s first ever foreign language film, where for most of the runtime, her signature twang is replaced with fluent French.
Foster plays Lillian Reiner, a renowned psychiatrist who learns that one of her patients, Paula (Virgine Efira), has suddenly died. The circumstances around her death are mysterious, with police ruling it as a suicide, and Paula’s husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric) and daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) think Lillian’s incompetence is to blame. Lillian is incredibly troubled by Paula’s death, and the circumstances, including strange behaviour from Simon and Valérie, lead to her believing that Paula might have actually been murdered. With Simon and Valérie as her two prime suspects, Lillian launches a private investigation with the help of her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), who she is still more than friendly with. Straying far from her professional limits and boundaries, Lillian is plunged into a psychological whirlwind of lies, questions and visions as she searches for the truth.
It is incredibly cool to see a legend like Foster do something so different at this point in her career, and she is linguistically brilliant and effortless in this French film. No matter what language she speaks, Foster always has that powerful screen presence that allows her to hold command of every scene she appears in. A Private Life offers an intriguing set-up with its murder mystery and morally grey characters, and finds a nice spot to sit on the scale between drama and dark comedy. One memorable scene sees Lillian go to the police with her suspicions, that she thinks they are connected to a vision she had under hypnosis of herself as a male Jewish cellist during World War II. When the officers ask her profession and she says psychiatrist, they give each other a bemused glance. Moments like this help relieve the more sombre tone and pacing, with another highlight being the relationship between Lillian and Gabriel, which is genuinely wholesome and touching. It is in these more human moments that the film becomes engaging, because unfortunately, the plot does lose momentum as the mystery unfolds in convoluted fashion. When the story intertwines with the fiction Lillian is experiencing during her hypnosis sessions, threads become difficult to follow, and the central ‘murder’ begins to feel less compelling as it is forced to take a backseat. Focusing on the psychological state of a psychiatrist like Lillian is an interesting direction, but this could have been done in a much more focused and effective way.
A Private Life is notable as the foreign language film debut of Foster, but somewhat fails to leave a lasting impact, despite many promising elements.
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A Private Life is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.