Vie Privée (France 2024)

Jodie Foster’s second French film, after A Very Long Engagement (2004), turns out to be an hommage to a certain kind of Hollywood comedy thriller. After the screening various suggestions were floated by colleagues re its inspiration with Woody Allen and Hitchcock the most popular. It was co-written and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski whose earlier film Grand Central (France 2013) is a good example of a narrative which takes a French story and imagines it as inspired by classical Hollywood. After the screening I found the Press Notes and Jodie Foster’s comments about the story. Given her previous experience on what was a French-American co-production through Warner Bros. France, she was very happy to read the script for this wholly French production.

Ms Foster is a fluent French speaker but even so the script makes her a long-time American resident in France. She is a Freudian psychoanalyst and her now aged mentor is played by the great documentarist Frederick Wiseman. Freudian psychoanalysis is no longer fashionable in the US Foster argues and that was another reason to take the role. Her character is Lilian Steiner a woman separated from her husband Gabriel, an ophthalmologist played by Daniel Auteuil – now a rather more grizzled greybeard than he used to be. Her son Julien (Vincent Lacoste) is married with a new baby. Lilian is still practising but is rather irritated by a patient who has come to complain that she has been treating him for years but never managed to help him quit smoking. Now he has seen a hypnotist who has ‘cured’ him and he seems to want his money back. Lilian dismisses him but finds herself confronted by a young woman who is the daughter of an old friend Paula (Virginie Efira) and Lilian is shocked to hear that her friend has committed suicide. When Lilian goes to the Jewish funeral the bereaved husband (Mathieu Amalric) turns on her and claims Lilian is somehow responsible for Paula’s death. Lilian seeks help from her estranged husband and consults another old friend Vera (Irene Jacob) as she starts the search for the truth. The plot involves Lilian herself trying hypnosis, ‘meeting’ Paula and having other weird experiences ‘under the influence’.

Jodie Foster has great fun playing the sleuth and Daniel Auteuil joins in with gusto. The film was lensed by Georges Lechaptois who also shot Rebecca Zlotowski’s previous film Other People’s Children (France 2022).  The ‘chase’ for clues makes use of some interesting locations and is suitably murky in places as well as making good use of staircases. There is a strong sense of the Parisian Jewish community – the director’s father Rabbi Michel Zlotowski makes an appearance as he has in several of his daughter’s films and one of Lilian’s nightmarish experiences is when she imagines she is caught up with the round-up of Jews by the Milice, the Vichy militia in Paris. This moment jars with the more jokey passages. The Jewish background of the characters and the importance of psychoanalysis is perhaps the major reference to Woody Allen plus the couple bumbling along together (and still very much connected). Overall it’s a starry cast, though Virginie Efira, arguably the current star of French art cinema, seems underused. I did enjoy myself but I was definitely disappointed that it didn’t manage much more. This was the only visit I could manage to the Leeds Film Festival this year and I watched the film a fortnight ago. It says something that I can’t really remember what happened in the resolution to the narrative – but perhaps I wasn’t at my best on a Monday afternoon and I found it hard to concentrate. When I later read the Press Notes I realised that the director chose to develop a script by Anne Berest and to use a title borrowed from Louis Malle’s 1962 film with Brigitte Bardot and Marcel Mastroianni. Once again an attempt to realise a French story with an American twist. Her intention was to address the self doubts of a bourgeois French woman.

Here is the clip released for promotion in English language territories. It shows Lilian stealing the details of a specific character from an archive. There are relatively few promotional photos around. IMDb suggests that the film wil be released in the UK and Ireland by Altitude Film  Entertainment.