Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life is a movie that has a lot going on, perhaps too much. Its tonal shifts are overwhelming, but it does contain an outstanding Jodie Foster performance.
A Cannes debut last year and 2025 awards-qualifying release, A Private Life opened in limited release last week and expands later in January. A Private Life is a France-set film, mostly in the French language, from a French filmmaker, but starring the very American Foster as an American psychiatrist who’s lived in Paris for a long time. Foster speaks French—a language the actress has been fluent in since she was a child—although amusingly, most of her (plentiful) cursing is in English.
She plays Lilian, a psychiatrist in Paris who records her sessions using obsolete mini-discs, indicating that, contrary to her professional obligations, she’s not really listening. She falls into despair and crisis when one of her patients dies from suicide, and begins to suspect that perhaps the death wasn’t so cut-and-dried after all. She also cries all the time, something she hadn’t done much of before. It’s a moment of professional doubts, but it ultimately proves something deeper than that.
Lilian also runs afoul of the family of the deceased, led by her husband (Mathieu Amalric). Her own family is another issue; she’s taken up again with her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), although she doesn’t appear comfortable around her son (Vincent Lacoste, who looks just like Sam Bankman-Fried) or his partner and child.
Meanwhile, legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman shows up as Foster’s own therapist, in the latest of a series of cameos in arthouse movies; he looks remarkably similar to the great scene in The Sopranos in which a therapist looks right at Carmela and tells her she’s complicit in her husband’s crimes.
The film is a mystery, an amateur detective story, and an exploration of everybody’s favorite subject, generational trauma. The Foster character is an assimilated Jew, but starts to have visions of a Nazi-era raid on an orchestra in which she and the dead woman are playing instruments. Also, the presence of dybbuks—the Jewish ghostly spirits like the one at the beginning of the Coens’ A Serious Man—is raised here as well.
Coming from a French Jewish director, it’s a rare modern cinematic commentary on Jewish identity in that particular country, at least among movies released in the U.S. Do these elements all work together? Not necessarily, and the whodunit part doesn’t have a satisfactory conclusion. But A Private Life is held together by Foster’s excellent turn.