A PRIVATE LIFE (B-minus) - Jodie Foster is the perfect late-career star to shepherd this off-kilter light-hearted dramedy about a psychiatrist in Paris who feels compelled to investigate the suicide of one of her patients, with frustrating results.
The movie is corny and derivative, but it is somehow held together by Foster -- speaking passable French as Dr. Lilian Steiner -- and by a weird puzzle-like structure that manages to cohere until its droll ending. It's almost an obsessive homage to not only old film noirs but also 1970s cop/private-eye TV shows like "Columbo," "Rockford Files," or "Police Woman."
Foster's Lilian struggles to connect with or pay close attention to her clients. She insists on recording her sessions on digital tapes, despite the long-outdated nature of the technology. She reconnects with her ex-husband (a wonderfully wry Daniel Auteuil) and feuds with the dead patient's husband and daughter, played by the impeccable Mathieu Amalric ("If You Don't, I Will" and Wes Anderson ensembles) and wide-eyed Luanna Bajrami. The father and daughter understandably have issues with Lilian's treatment of a woman who was driven to suicide; Lilian doesn't buy the suicide story (an overdose from a prescription penned by Lilian) and suspects the father and/or daughter of murder.
Virginia Efira ("Madeleine Collins") is seen in flashbacks as the dead woman, Paula. The scenes from her therapy sessions have a dream-like quality, often including voice-overs, as if she is speaking from the grave. The tape of her final session goes missing, and the husband might be involved in a break-in at Lilian's office. There is also a disgruntled patient of Lilian's (Noam Morgensztern), who is suing her for years of pricey sessions wasted, when all it took for him to quit smoking was one session with a hypnotist.
Lilian goes to visit the hypnotist, to be put under a spell (she is trying to cure the inexplicable onset of tears that beset her), and this is where the film wanders into the territory of a Woody Allen farce. Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski is on thin ice with this and other trite touches that occasionally pop up along the way. (We get the requisite scene of Lilian distracting a worker in order to sneak into the files that include the name of Paula's aunt (the arresting Aurore Clement ("The New Girlfriend") in a cameo. Then she does a similar thing late in the film.) We also see Lilian, during her hypnotic trance, flashing back to Nazi-occupied Paris, where she and Paula play together in an orchestra and are lovers. Visually, Zlotowski is fond of shooting up at or down from spiral staircases, in a lazy wink at Hitchcock.
In anticipation of this current release, we sampled the previous film by Zlotowski, "Other People's Children," which was watchable but which we found to be "tripping over the line between legitimate drama and Hallmark shmaltz." Here she has two co-writers. And most important, she has a game Foster, who does a fantastic job of rolling out a world-weary ennui disrupted by a genuine desire to prove her hunch (and to essentially uphold Lilian's professional reputation). Lilian also has a strained relationship with her son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), and a Freudian aversion to her own grandchild.
It helps if you don't take this too seriously. It is an airy caper that doesn't always make sense. (The final reveal didn't need to be as confusing as it plays out, either.) But the puzzle does eventually come together, like a satisfying two-part episode of "Murder, She Wrote."
BONUS TRACKS
From the film's climax, a little ditty from J.J. Cale, "Don't Go to Strangers":
And this snippet from the closing credits, "Wander 12" by Rob Lahana:
