A Private Life (2025)
Let’s start with what works, because quite a lot does. Jodie Foster gives a performance of genuine intelligence and controlled wit. The Paris photography flatters everything it touches. Rebecca Zlotowski, working from a script she co-wrote with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, shows a real feel for the particular rhythms of adult comedy-drama. She has an instinct for the kind of film where people say cutting things to each other over good wine and nobody quite means what they say. For long stretches, A Private Life is a pleasure to sit with. The pity is that the script keeps finding ways to trip over itself.
Foster plays Dr Lilian Steiner, a prominent Parisian psychiatrist who, after the sudden death of a long-term patient she refuses to accept as suicide, launches a private investigation. She pulls in her affable ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), her estranged son Julien (Vincent Lacoste), and a rotating cast of peripheral characters whose relevance to the central mystery drifts in and out without apparent logic. The film arrives dressed for Hitchcock, makes a sharp left turn, and ends up somewhere closer to Woody Allen with a Paris address and a prescription pad.
The tonal shift works because the performances carry it. Foster, performing in French for the bulk of the film, gets to work in a dryly comic register she is rarely offered in her American projects, and the results repay attention. Her Lilian is a woman who has spent decades studying other people’s inner lives at close range while keeping her own sealed off from the same scrutiny. Watching that contradiction begin to surface is, in my opinion, the film’s most rewarding thread, more rewarding than the mystery plot surrounding it.
Auteuil brings warmth and an unforced ease to Gabriel. His scenes with Foster, two people who have travelled far enough past the wreckage of a marriage to arrive at something resembling genuine friendship, have a lived-in quality that the thriller elements never quite match. Virginie Efira makes a strong impression in a role that deserved considerably more room than it received.
The script is the persistent problem. It piles up subplots across family estrangement, questions of Jewish identity, professional failure, and marital history, and resolves few of them with any conviction. Several threads are introduced with apparent weight and then abandoned without ceremony. A hypnosis sequence that should land as a deliberate comic set-piece tips instead into unintentional farce. By the time the film is ready to deliver its answers, a number of the original questions have gone cold.
Zlotowski has made something that works better in individual scenes than as a coherent whole. The pace is brisk enough to carry viewers across the structural gaps, and the surface pleasures (the cast, the setting, the easy chemistry between Foster and Auteuil) are genuine. A tighter script would have produced a considerably better film. There is, I suspect, a sharper version of A Private Life inside this one that a more disciplined edit would have found.
What this film does well, and does with conviction, is examine what it costs a person to spend their professional life inside other people’s heads while their own life goes unexamined. A psychiatrist who can read everyone else’s evasions but struggles to name her own is not a startlingly original idea, but Foster makes it feel specific and closely observed. The mystery plot surrounding her is, in my view, the weaker half of the film; the character study it occasionally interrupts is the more honest and considered piece of work.