Lilian Steiner (played by French-speaking Jodie Foster) is a traditional psychoanalyst in Paris. She listens to the patients on their divan as they share their innermost secrets and fears and she sits comfortably in her armchair inside her luxurious apartment. Her respectable life begins to fall apart after one patient sues her for €40,000, the amount of money he spent on her services over the decades to no results, and another one commits suicide. The latter is Paula Cohen-Salal (Virginie Efira). Distant and cold Lilian begins to cry for no reason. At first, she suspects that the tears have a clinical explanation. Ophthalmologist Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), who also also to be her ex and the father of their only child, reassures Lilian that’s not the case. Maybe Lilian has hidden sentiments that are trying to come out.
Paula’s daughter Valerie (Luàna Bajrami) visits Lilian, questioning how her mother could have killed herself just days after seeing her trusted psychoanalyst. Due to patient confidentiality, Lilian refuses to share any information with the young woman. Instead she begins to investigate the lives of Cohen-Salal family, convinced that either Valerie or her father Simon (Mathieu Amalric) have murdered Paula. A furious Simon alleges that Lilian instead is to blame for Paula’s alleged suicide. He abruptly throws Lilian out of his house when she shows up in order to pay her respects to the griving family.
A very confused Lilian does the hitherto unthinkable: she visits a hypnotherapist (Sophie Guillemin) and engages in past life regression (something guaranteed to have Freud rolling in his grave). The father of psychoanalysis had abandoned hypnotherapy “because it cured patients too quickly”, the hypnotist tells the erstwhile sceptical protagonist (while conveniently omitting the fact that the Austrian neurologist had never performed past life regression). During her journey to the past, Lilian sees herself and Paula as orchestra musicians and hidden lovers in Nazi Germany. In A Private Life‘s peculiar little world, past lives entail keeping the same bodies: Foster and Effira play themselves in Lilian’s vision of her past life.
The only comfort Lilian can find is in her ex. Gabriel helps Valerie in her every endeavour, perhaps lured by the apparent promise of rekindling their relation. Their son Julien (Vincent Lacoste) is a lot less empathetic of his seeming delirious mother. Lilian alternates between past life and criminal arguments and conspiracy idiocies with the casualness of a teenager commenting on TikTok. As her mind becomes fractured, the plot gets increasingly absurd. French director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski is well aware of this and explores this bewilderment for comic effect. Lilian shares her theories to a perplexed Julien during a broken family dinner (by far the funniest scene in the movie). Doting Gabriel remains supportive throughout, even when Lilian disappointingly reveals that he was not present in her previous life at all. Julien, on ther other hand, was a Nazi officer. This explains their turbulent mother-son relationship, she arcertains.
What started out as a more traditional psychological thriller suddens morphs into a black comedy. This sudden genre shift comes at a price. The credible developments at the beginning of the story become more or less irrelevant. By the time Lilian’s mind (and therefore the movie itself) spirals out of control, it’s too late for the humour to succeed in its full ambition. As a result, the film feels slightly torn between priorities: examining the fractured mind of a psychoanalyst-gone-nuts, or making audiences laugh. Foster is very convincing as a tormented professional, yet less so as the caricature of a disorientated woman. Her comedic skills are entirely not on a par with her dramatic ones. That too prevents A Private Life from achieving its full potential.
A Private Life showed in the 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival, where this piece was originally written. Also showing at the 69th BFI London Film Festival.
