Key Highlights
- Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
- Jodie Foster is such a trustworthy actor, so intelligent about her credibility, that she can lead a patchwork French mystery-drama like “A Private Life” — which boasts the Academy Award winner’s Franco-fluency — as if it were simultaneously a wink at her celebrity, a perfect showcase for her talent and a handsome mess fortunate to have her imprimatur.
- In a way that makes her an ideal French movie star: a special brand of high wattage (Deneuve, Huppert, Binoche) that imbues just the right amount of class to an undercooked piece of adult peekaboo, while still burnishing the actor’s reputation. Filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski, whose last film was the heartfelt, complicated “Other People’s Children,” does well to cast Foster as American-born, Paris-based psychiatrist Lilian Steiner.
- It isn’t long after meeting Lilian in her well-appointed apartment/office, alone on a rainy night, bristling at her upstairs neighbors’ loud music and leaving a brusque voicemail for an absentee patient, that we sense this control-minded professional is in for some destabilizing.
- And knowing this is in Foster’s hands comes as close to a guarantee of quality as a movie can offer. The swerve comes when Lilian learns that the absentee client — a beautiful, troubled woman named Paula (Virginie Efira, seen in flashbacks) — died suddenly.
