A private Life

Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life (Vie privée) arrives as one of those rare cinematic works that dares to shift its tone constantly, weaving comedy, thriller, psychological drama, and even romance into a single, eccentric package. At its center is Jodie Foster, taking on her first leading role entirely in French, and it is her magnetic presence that holds together a film that could otherwise collapse under the weight of its many ideas. The film positions her as Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst based in Paris, who learns that one of her long-term patients, Paula (played with a luminous fragility by Virginie Efira), has died in what appears to be a suicide. This event unravels Lilian’s carefully controlled world, pushing her into an obsessive investigation that is part murder mystery, part mid-life reckoning, and ultimately a mirror held back to herself.

From the very first moments, Rebecca Zlotowski sets the tone with Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” blasting over the credits, only to reveal the music is not part of the score but bleeding through from the apartment upstairs. It’s a small joke, but a telling one: this is not a film about easy suspense but about the absurdities of modern life, about how the banal can slip into the uncanny. Lilian records her therapy sessions on outdated MiniDiscs, a quirky detail that serves both as a nostalgic artifact and a symbol of her inability to adapt. When one of those recordings, the final conversation with Paula, is stolen, the prop suddenly becomes a narrative hinge, a metaphor for memory and truth being literally taken from her. In this sense, the thriller elements often feel like pretexts for Rebecca Zlotowski to explore her true subject: the instability of identity, the fictions we tell ourselves, and the ways therapy can blur into invention.

The patient’s death leads Lilian to a charged encounter with Paula’s husband Simon, played with gleeful menace by Mathieu Amalric, who publicly denounces her at the funeral and accuses her of over-prescribing antidepressants. His outbursts cast suspicion in multiple directions, especially when paired with the distant oddness of Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami). Yet Rebecca Zlotowski refuses to craft a straightforward whodunit. Instead, she repeatedly undercuts the momentum with detours into Lilian’s private life—her strained relationship with her aloof son Julien (Vincent Lacoste), her rekindled chemistry with her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), and her unexpected vulnerability as she becomes plagued by uncontrollable tears. This crying, at first presented as a medical problem, evolves into one of the film’s most peculiar running gags. Lilian insists it is her tear ducts malfunctioning, but the sight of Jodie Foster dabbing her eyes while attempting to maintain professional composure reveals an inner collapse she refuses to admit. It is in such contradictions—where the tragic tips into the comedic—that the film thrives.

The film’s boldest gambit comes when Lilian, seeking relief from her affliction, visits a hypnotist, portrayed by Sophie Guillemin. Under trance, she experiences a surreal dreamscape in which she and Paula are lovers in Nazi-occupied France, with Simon conducting an orchestra that transforms into a firing squad, while Julien appears in the uniform of an SS officer. It is a sequence both grotesque and playful, like a warped homage to Hitchcock’s Spellbound filtered through François Truffaut’s The Last Metro. Critics may debate its narrative necessity, but its resonance lies in how it externalizes Lilian’s repressed guilt, her Jewish identity, and her estrangement from her own son. The absurdity of this vision underscores the film’s refusal to conform: it is not a dream meant to solve the mystery, but one that refracts Lilian’s psyche back at her, offering insight only through distortion.

What anchors all this is Jodie Foster’s extraordinary performance. It has been two decades since her brief French-language appearance in A Very Long Engagement, and here she proves herself utterly at ease, shifting between precise, almost clinical articulation and sudden bursts of English curses that betray her outsider status. Watching her oscillate between steely determination and comic exasperation is a revelation. There is a delightful looseness in her work here, far from the tightly wound roles that have defined much of her American career. In one scene, when Gabriel watches her cry and tells her with a smile, “It suits you,” the exchange carries the lightness of a romantic comedy, revealing the effortless rapport between Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil. Their banter and lingering glances, whether breaking into a suspect’s home or reminiscing over the wreckage of their marriage, provide the film with its most affecting moments. In fact, their chemistry recalls the screwball energy of remarriage comedies, and it is no accident that some viewers will leave remembering their exchanges more than the mystery itself.

Still, the supporting cast adds rich textures. Virginie Efira appears mostly in flashbacks but leaves an indelible presence, her character a ghostly echo haunting Lilian’s conscience. Mathieu Amalric, as ever, brings a combination of unpredictability and sly humor, his Simon both threatening and faintly ridiculous. And then there is Frederick Wiseman, making a brief cameo as Lilian’s former mentor, offering cryptic advice that Lilian promptly ignores. His presence is both an in-joke and a reminder of the porous line between documentary truth and narrative fabrication, a theme that runs through the film’s DNA.

Visually, A Private Life is a glossy, elegant production. George Lechaptois’s cinematography captures Paris with a sheen that recalls French thrillers of the 1980s, polished yet tinged with melancholy. The editing by Géraldine Mangenot keeps the narrative nimble, while the playful score by Robin Coudert (Rob) injects bursts of whimsical energy, often undercutting the supposed gravity of a scene with percussive flourishes or ironic staccato rhythms. The result is a film that feels deliberately unstable, one moment veering into noir suspense, the next into slapstick absurdity.

What lingers after the credits, though, is not the resolution of Paula’s death—an ending that feels, if anything, deliberately anticlimactic—but the sense of watching a woman forced to confront her own silences. Lilian is a psychoanalyst who has forgotten how to listen, to her patients, her son, and herself. Her obsessive pursuit of answers becomes less about uncovering a crime than about discovering her own capacity for empathy and vulnerability. In this way, Rebecca Zlotowski crafts a film that is as much about therapy itself—the endless oscillation between truth and projection, insight and illusion—as about any conventional mystery.

A Private Life may frustrate viewers seeking a taut thriller or a neatly tied narrative. It is, at times, messy, overloaded, even contradictory. Yet within that mess lies its charm. Rebecca Zlotowski is less interested in closure than in the pleasures of uncertainty, in letting her characters stumble through their obsessions and desires with wit and chaos. And with Jodie Foster delivering one of her most surprising performances in years, the film becomes a lively, unpredictable meditation on identity, guilt, and the fictions that sustain us. It may not be the most polished jewel in Rebecca Zlotowski’s career, but it is one of her most fascinating experiments—a film where, appropriately enough, the mystery remains less in what happened than in the private lives we guard so fiercely from ourselves.

A private Life
Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski
Written by Rebecca Zlotowski, Anne Berest, Gaëlle Macé
Produced by Frederic Jouve
Starring  Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira
Cinematography : George Lechaptois
Edited by Géraldine Mangenot
Music by Robin Rob Coudert
Production companies : Les Films Velvet, France 3 Cinéma
Distributed by Ad Vitam (France)
Release dates : 20 May 2025 (Cannes), 26 November 2025 (France)
Running time : 105 minutes

Seen on September 13 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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