Review: A Private Life

Director: Rebecca Zlotowski

Stars: Jodie Foster, Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Auteuil

The unofficial anthem of Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life is ‘Psycho Killer’ by Talking Heads, a most fitting theme given the song’s sloshed interpolation of French into American English, evocative in and of itself of the filmmaker’s often confused and spinning protagonist; expat psychiatrist Dr. Lilian Steiner (a bilingual Jodie Foster). Zlotowski came to prominence in the mid-to-late 2010s with curios like Grand Central and her quite excellent An Easy Girl, making herself a name to keep a lookout for. Having missed the opportunity to catch 2022’s Other People’s Children, the arrival of her latest over a year after it’s Cannes debut had me chomping lightly at the bit.

I wasn’t the only one keen to spend some time in the presence of Zlotowski. A Private Life is awash with European acting royalty and remarkable cameos besides (Frederick Wiseman!!!!!! RIP), which makes the quixotic, irreverent nature of the piece all the more disarming and discombobulating. Here Zlotowski presents a character study and quasi-murder mystery that steadfast refuses to take itself seriously, playing just as fervently as a late-in-life rekindling of love and friendship between Lilian and her ex-husband Gaby (Daniel Auteuil) who is willingly dragged into Lilian’s paranoiac follies.

With a penchant for recording every one of her sessions to minidisc – a shorthand indicator that she’s stuck in a rut and maybe not paying attention – Lilian is thrown off her stride when she learns that one of her patients, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), has died from an apparent suicide. Discovering this coincides with an inexplicable jag of involuntary crying which leads her back to her optometrist ex. Taking a leaf out of the book of a more troublesome patient, Lilian goes to an alternative healer named Jessica Grangé (Sophie Guillemin) to stop her eyes from watering, only to find herself unexpectedly regressed to a past life experience that reconnects her with many of the people presently occupying her mind, not least the recently deceased Paula. Following this, Lilian becomes convinced that Paula was in fact murdered. And, as the Cohen-Solal family grow tested by her prying, Lilian spirals into erratic behaviours to prove out her increasingly madcap theories.

A Private Life gives the good impression that it’s bringing meaty discussion points to the table. While the screenplay at large seems perpetually skeptical of the benefits of various forms of therapy, it also starts spinning out ideas relating to modern European Jewishness, the sanitisation of grief within this framework and varying forms of post-COVID malaise irrespective of religious background. It also seems to be wandering the same corridors as David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, perceiving grief itself as a kind of unsolvable conspiracy theory. Lilian is surprisingly open to suggestion. She delves eagerly down the rabbit-hole of her questionable past life regression, while she’s the first to suggest that she may have disturbed the ‘dybbuk’ of Paula when she gatecrashed shiva at the family home to immediate consternation.

But just like the scant sapphic suggestions that there’s something more profound and sexual between Lilian and Paula, so A Private Life seems committed to shrugging off more serious dissection. By the second half all illusions are cast aside and we’re firmly in the realms of a half-baked paranoiac thriller that’s played – increasingly – as just sort of silly. By the time Lilian and Gaby are trying to sneak onto the property of Paula’s widower Simon (Mathieu Amalric) the film has fully embraced the kind of comedy-of-errors caperdom that the Coen Brothers once subscribed to. It’s eminently fun, but it feels a little like Zlotowski is shirking anything more meaningful coming of her dalliance.

Still, dalliance isn’t the worst thing to spend 100 minutes with, and if A Private Life is a little too evasive for its own good, it also manages to present something optimistic in its closing passages. Lilian’s attempts to unravel the culprit behind Paula’s death ultimately leads her (and others) to question her own part in the story. She is moved to re-examine her own methodology and question the things she may have been taking for granted for too long. There’s a paean here for old fashioned human engagement, freed from distraction or over-complication, and a timely reminder that – for better and sometimes for worse – our humanity is ultimately all we can rely on.