Garnishing is usually perfectly pleasant with a nicely cooked main, but rarely enough when served on its own. And Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest, “A Private Life,” is very much a garnishing, a sleek, slight thriller that amuses but fails to find much of a sliver of sustenance.
Here, Jodie Foster lands her first-ever lead role, acting in her second language as Paris-based American psychiatrist Lilian. By the time we first meet her, it’s the end of another long day, and she has just called to check in on Paula (Virginie Efira), a patient who missed her last three appointments. The doctor is worried, yes, but there is also the matter of payment for the lapsed sessions. Lilian’s practice seems largely focused on this lulling rhythm of routine and the steadiness of admin until she hears that Paula is dead by suicide.
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Psychiatrists, unlike surgeons or on-call doctors, work around the ever-present idea of death but are mostly protected from the feeling of having life seep from a body held by their hands. Paula’s suicide shocks Lilian. What was her mood the last time she lay on her couch? Did she give any signs of suicidal ideation? Could she have done something to help? Plagued by questions she’ll never find the answers for, Lilian decides to attend Paula’s funeral, where she meets her patient’s daughter and husband — the young woman is intrigued by the doctor, her father less so, a finger-wagging, guilt-placing man, who wants to chase the psychiatrist out of their lives with an urgency that feels less informed by grief than secrecy.
“A Private Life” is at its most interesting when it zooms into the Hitchcockian spiral Lilian plunges into, built by a growing obsession with a death she can’t quite process. Paula never seemed suicidal, so something must surely be wrong. The husband looked a bit off, didn’t he? Or maybe the heavily pregnant daughter, brimming with the ferocity of hormones, attacked an anchoring semblance of motherhood before being welcomed into it herself. In a standout sequence, Foster’s psychiatrist sits uncomfortably as the long, bedazzled nails of a young hypnotist hover over her frowning semblance. Her skepticism proves a flimsy mental barrier, a lived reality blurring into a parallel one as the woman walks the corridors of her own brain, opening doors to lives lived and unlived.
Foster’s performance in a non-native language lends itself to this discomfort, generated by a sudden rupture with the soothing placidity of a cemented routine, but also by the existential shifting of Lilian’s deeply rooted beliefs. There is pleasure to be had in neglecting the rational, with the doctor quickly settling into this Poirot-esque stint with not only a certain giddy hunger but also an oddly renewed sense of purpose, which masks the looming dread of guilt. As those around her begin to grow worried, Lilian simply shrugs, for there is a great difference between the deluded and the willing, one she clearly understands, thank you very much.
Surprisingly, it is when “A Private Life” seeps into a family drama that it mostly loses it steam. Zlotowski’s recent “Other People’s Children” proved a work of not only great sensitivity around a thorny, growing modern family issue — what happens to the connection between stepparents and children once a relationship is over? — but also of great refinement, finding in patient observation a great sense of tenderness and aching longing. In trying to exist somewhere between a crime thriller, a whodunnit and a dramedy, the director’s follow-up foregoes that refinement, ping-ponging between conversing genre tropes to the expense of contemplation.
In the family front, the one great highlight is Daniel Auteuil as Lilian’s ex-husband, Gabriel. Paula’s death brings the two close to, if not a reconciliation, a pleasurable reacquaintance. Auteuil’s effervescent charm perfectly counterbalances Foster’s more contrived demeanour, and the rekindling of a formative relationship, previously corroded by the grating banalities of a marriage, helps put into perspective the dimension of Lilian’s shift.
Gabriel is an ophthalmologist and brings with him the sight to Lilian’s hearing at a time when she is desperately unsure if her practice has become so jaded that she has morphed into a mere listener instead of an active interlocutor. Whenever it leans into these poignant metaphors to ask questions of guilt and duty, “A Private Life” grasps at something real and raw. It’s a shame Zlotowski so willingly refuses to take her finger off that pulse, even if the result remains a pleasurable ride. [C+]
