by Julian Wood
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Lacoste
Intro:
A nimble, well-scripted crime drama set in Paris, what’s not to like?
Everyone’s got secrets in their private life, right? And the effort to conceal them can sometimes feel overwhelming. People feel the need to tell their secrets to someone, well, in secret and that’s why we have priests and – their modern equivalent – therapists.
The central character of Rebecca Zlotowski’s crime drama, A Private Life, is a therapist called Dr Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster). She spends all day listening to her clients unburden themselves, but she has problems of her own. She has a strained relationship with her adult son Julien (Vincent Lacoste) and an on again/off again connection to her husband Gabriel (the French cinema icon Daniel Auteuil).
Lilian comes to suspect that one of her clients, Paula (Virginie Efira), did not suicide but was murdered. She then becomes obsessed with establishing the facts of the matter and, as the title suggests, becomes a sort-of self-appointed private eye. All this snooping around is aided in a rather reluctant way by Gabriel, who clearly is still attracted to his ex-wife, and the two of them come to find the hunt for clues as a kind of erotic adventure of its own. Lilian has obviously blundered across many professional boundaries that patient confidentiality would require, but the film gives only cursory attention to her angst about this, preferring instead to woo us with the sheer fun of sleuthing. A touch of the real breaks through occasionally with some raw scenes involving the partly-estranged son, but these seem to sit uncomfortably with the tone of the film as a whole.
French cinema can often do this mixed-tone stuff rather well, for example in the darkly comic touches of Claude Chabrol’s crime films. A better point of comparison here might be Francois Truffaut’s wonderful Finally Sunday (1983), in which the boss’s secretary become a crime solver. Zlotowski is no Truffaut (but that might be an unfair yardstick), but she has brought off a clever and enjoyable film. Foster is in good form. She inhabits her nervy and slightly odd character with aplomb and shows once again that she is perfectly capable of acting in French (even though she has to be flagged in the plot as an American to explain her accent). Anything with Auteuil is worth watching, and the two of them develop chemistry as the film reaches its more enjoyable third act.
A nimble, well-scripted crime drama set in Paris, what’s not to like?
