Early on in “A Private Life,” Lillian Steiner (Jodie Foster) asks her son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste) to bulk order her some new minidiscs. She’s a psychiatrist, and she needs them to store her recorded sessions.
Julien is annoyed at her insistence on storing her recordings physically in 2025 – but Lillian is set in her ways. “Because I can lose them, that makes them precious,” she says of the discs. Julien rolls his eyes: “Spare me.”
This interaction says a lot about Lillian in a short amount of time, and also has a lot of ideas about virtue signaling via physical media (later, Lillian will be accused of only recording her sessions so she doesn’t have to actually listen to her patients in the moment). But, it mostly hammers home the idea that once Lillian is set on something, it’s hard to make her let it go. So, when her favorite patient, Paula (Virginie Efira), dies unexpectedly by suicide – having not given Lillian any sort of indication that she was suicidal at all – Lillian is on the case.
There’s a lot of fun to be had with Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life,” which features Foster as a sort of Humphrey Bogart type caught in a world of domestic Parisian troubles as she tails Paula’s family, sneaks into homes that aren’t hers, and engages with a hypnotist as she tries to uncover what, exactly, happened to Paula. But, for as fun as that premise is, the screenplay gets a bit convoluted by the film’s end, the answer to this mystery not nearly as satisfying as it originally portends to be.
Our motive and suspects are introduced rather quickly. In one session, Paula confessed to Lillian that her husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) is not the biological father of her daughter, Valérie (Luana Bajrami). For some reason, this immediately causes Lillian to suspect Valérie as the murderer, not Simon (in a fun twist, unlike Humphrey Bogart, Lillian is not actually that good of a detective).
Still, Lillian’s attempts at playing private eye are the most entertaining sections of the film, enlisting the help of her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) and ignoring her own problems as stalwartly as possible. Lillian’s personal issues are an undercurrent to this first part of the story – her relationships with her son and ex-husband are fraught to say the least, and she’s clearly working through a sort of attraction to Paula that she doesn’t quite understand. In one funny bit of characterization, Lillian starts crying immediately following Paula’s funeral, and can’t seem to stop. Her insistence that everything is alright, despite copious amounts of tears falling from her eyes, is a good encapsulation of Lillian’s ability to compartmentalize.
Lillian’s a difficult person, particularly when it comes to her relationship with Julien – she barely sees him, and refuses to see his child, her grandchild, at all. In some of the film’s most striking filmmaking, Lillian, through hypnosis, comes to believe that in a past life, she (as a man) had a romantic relationship with Paula, accounting for her strong emotional reaction to her death. In that same vision, her son’s past life self also appears as a member of an anti-Jewish militia sent to hunt Lillian down. Lillian takes this to heart, deflecting blame for her and Julien’s relationship onto something that, in addition to being wildly fanciful, is completely out of his control.
This is a very strange turn and big swing for this type of movie to make, but – for as elegantly shot as the sequence is – when “A Private Life” starts attempting to psychoanalyze Lillian, it loses its spark of mystery. The biggest issue with “A Private Life” is it can’t seem to really commit to any one thing. It’s almost a murder mystery, almost a romantic drama, almost a character study, and so on. Instead of doing one or a few of these genres with conviction, it glosses over each of them. It’s at its best when it’s going full Agatha Christie murder mystery, but even that swing falls flat, the answer hinging on characters and plot beats the audience simply doesn’t care about.
