A Private Life is the “Jodie Foster speaks French shock!” movie, and it’s a funny old beast, as if the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma – the fixer who cannot fix her own life – had been re-written by Agatha Christie and then weirded-up with a plot involving past lives.
Another way of looking at it is that it’s a 1940s noir, as refracted through Robert Altman’s 1970s update of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. But let’s go to cold hard facts and leave the analysis to work itself out. Foster is Lilian Steiner, a Jewish American psychotherapist based in France who seems to be having trouble keeping hold of patients. Her son is also not as warmly engaged with her emotionally as she would like and she keeps having the unsettling experience of tears springing unbidden from her eyes at the most inconvenient times. Maybe her unconscious is trying to tell her something. Being a practical sort, Lilian consults her optometrist ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil).
For her twitchy psyche she also consults a fellow shrink (Sophie Guillemin, superb), who spins her back in time with some regression therapy to wartime France, where Lilian appears to be a member of an orchestra and is having a relationship with a mystery blonde (Virginie Efira) who looks suspiciously like a patient who recently committed suicide in the here and now. Maybe, in the past, Lilian also happens to be a man.
It’s a bewildering plot but the movie gets its legs properly under the table once Lilian decides she needs to turn sleuth to discover who killed – she’s convinced it’s murder – ex-patient Paula (Efira). Maybe the husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who flies into a rage every time he sees Liliane. Maybe the daughter (Luàna Bajrami), who is the one who tells Lilian it was suicide (though was it?).
Auteuil apart, as a rule of thumb, if you know the name – Efira and Amalric in particular – you don’t get very much of their presence on screen, as if a call has gone out for French actors who can give a Jodie Foster movie some French cred. Foster is very good, and relentlessly watchable, particularly at what might be called the “French” scenes, talky dinner-party set pieces of a sort you don’t get so much in a Hollywood film.
There are two different types of film and two different emotional registers here. The rational – the detective stuff – and the more florid “past lives” stuff involving raw emotion and fantasy. They are angular bedfellows but director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski – whose Grand Central and Other People’s Children were both brilliant dramas about off-centre relationships – does a pretty good job of keeping things snug until things fall badly apart within sight of the closing credits. You might not care by this point that the “explains it all” finale is just too pat, too rational, too keen to put the weird stuff back in its box, but at least it puts Amalric’s intensity to good use.
Raymond Chandler tells us that when you’ve spun a plot out of nothing into a fabulous web of intrigue, it had better resolve on nothing – a statuette that everyone’s looking for or something similar. Here, the opposite is the case, and too much new information, which is far too consequential, arrives right near the end, upsetting what’s been a very nicely judged balance up to that point.
It is a good, fun but not entirely there movie, full of weird nods to a disappeared world – like Lilian’s use of minidiscs to recorder her interactions with patients – and it is a funky sort of murder mystery, with some sublime scenes and superb acting. As for Foster’s French – she has a bit of an American accent but then she is playing an American in Paris. Perfect casting.
A Private Life (Vie privée) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
