James Y. Lee
There’s a great many incredibly striking ways to try and open one’s movie—and playing Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” over your opening credits might just take the cake. Not only is it a phenomenal song from a band and artist with deep ties to film, but it’s also lyrically ominous in ways that are both charming and suitably disjointed. Fundamentally, it’s a tale of a slow descent into madness and paranoia, directly inspired by none other than Norman Bates himself—and when we slowly segue into our introduction to psychotherapist Liliane Steiner (Academy Award winner Jodie Foster) in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, you get the sense that this character has probably dealt with this kind of madness for most of her career.
Liliane is an incredibly well-trained professional whose years upon years of experience has left her somewhat aloof and complacent about her job. She records all of her patients’ sessions, approaching all of their neuroses and torments with the same amount of controlled mediation, which reads more as dispassionate disengagement over time rather than overzealous professionalism. There are cracks in the mask. One among them being brief episodes of her crying uncontrollably, something she chalks up to a medical condition that she fruitlessly tries to get examined. Did I mention that this is a role where Jodie Foster speaks almost entirely in French—and exceptionally fluently, at that?
One patient in particular in A Private Life has Liliane’s vested interest—Paula (Virginie Efira of Benedetta), stuck in a troubled marriage, who’s missed the last several sessions she was scheduled to have with Liliane. She finds out the upsetting reason for Paula’s absence is that she died weeks earlier by suicide on an seeming overdose of psychiatric medications that Liliane prescribed her, for which her husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric, recently of The Phoenician Scheme), viciously resents Liliane. Seeking some kind of self-driven guidance for the sudden grief she feels, as well as a functional remedy for her inexplicably unceasing tears, Lilane remembers an irritated patient who once came into her office claiming that a local hypnotist was far more effective at stopping his smoking habit than Liliane’s therapy ever was.
As she seeks out said hypnotist (Juliette in Spring‘s Sophie Guillemin) herself, Liliane soon gets launched straight into a wildly impressionistic series of subconscious spaces—red hallways lined with doors, and stairways leading to nebulous places of interest. Here is where A Private Life‘s first prominent wrinkle shows; that this sequence in particular utilizes generative AI in order to create its surrealistic backdrops, a gesture intended to emphasize something more inhuman. However, it comes across instead as a decision made out of profound inconsideration. It’s a telling choice, in particular—why rely on something inherently artificial to try and offer texture to a world meant to represent the human subconscious?
It’s a vision of a supposed past life that Liliane eventually accesses through this hypnotism that provides the bedrock of much of A Private Life‘s initial narrative intrigue, and jumpstarts the mystery she chooses to investigate on her own. At once, we see a flurry of meaningful images and symbols, which we may presumably be lead to believe are pivotal subconscious clues about why Paula’s death matters so much to Liliane, and roots in Jewish history and beliefs that give Liliane some kind of a background outside of her work. A Private Life‘s second prominent wrinkle is in just how little of this is honed in on terms of the film’s deeply disjointed genre and tonal focus. From this “memory,” Liliane slowly becomes convinced from this point on that Paula was murdered, and she proceeds to dive further into trying to examine what she thinks could be the truth behind Paula’s death—driven by her own conclusions and beliefs, beyond the reach of law enforcement.
As A Private Life expands from there, Liliane’s rekindling flame with her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil of An Ordinary Case), becomes a major part of the ensuing investigation, which winds up revealing more about the flaws in Liliane’s personal affairs, especially her distancing relationship with her son, than the “mystery” at hand. Yet, it’s not clear which specific path Zlotowski wants us to see as the central core of the story until the narrative’s true priorities steadily begin to come into focus.
The initial hypnotism scene and vision that makes for the film’s most stylistically ostentatious stretch is far too intriguingly dense in symbolic and historic detail to feel like it’s designed to be some kind a red herring. Simultaneously, the leaps in logic that Liliane’s investigation requires may be a part of the personal neuroses that drives her to uncover the “truth” behind Paula’s death, a sign of some kind of hidden attraction she may have shared with Paula in a past life. A Private Life feels like it continually undercuts the more grounded personal drama that she shares in her relationships and her family, exchanging them frequently for haphazardly structured chases, stakeouts, and break-ins that play into typical mystery tropes and disjointedly yank us back in the other genre direction.
This isn’t a movie without its moments or merits, most of which are predicated on the cast. Jodie Foster is as great as ever, delivering a delightful surprise in the form of a performance almost exclusively driven by French (with the exception of English profanities) that never drags down the kind of emotional work she’s attempting to pull off with Liliane as a character. Daniel Auteuil and Mathieu Amalric remain some of our most interesting French performers to date, with the former lending charm to Gabriel where the latter lends Simon a sense of angered menace. Even legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman makes a brief appearance as Liliane’s mentor, working greatly with Foster in one scene to establish a kind of history for Liliane’s psychiatric practice, and where her methods may be going astray.
If only these actors had something more cohesive to work with. A Private Life frequently feels like an exercise in teasing an audience with character detail rather than a fully fledged character study in itself. It’s a film where the seemingly extraneous, but ultimately significant characters details that could have served its true focus—a story about wanting to find firm solutions in places where there may not be any, a parable with sapphic undertones and nods in the direction of Jewish identity and existence—may have had their chance to shine had Zlotowski’s script chosen not to divert so constantly to a mystery with more ostensible narrative prioritization. Liliane is never an uninteresting character, even as the film around her loses its way, which makes it frustrating for this film to seem like it has remarkably little idea of what it wants to do with such a fascinating jumble of traits, human needs, and idiosyncrasies.
Perhaps tangential as well, what a strange thing it is also to witness a film like A Private Life that has broadly made use of a technology whose capabilities are broadly irrelevant to the artistic intentions behind their deployment. Set aside the moot-at-this-point arguments about the artistic merit of the images generative AI produces—in the wake of all of the smoke that’s emerged about its environmental impacts, its litigious dubiousness, and its unregulated verisimilitude—is a technology, so rigidly rooted in individualism, the kind of thing we want to be endorsing in a creative industry built on collective effort? The sum of A Private Life‘s parts—its bizarre deployment of AI in a scene driven by the human subconscious, its disjointed tonal and narrative focus, and its disservice to a cast of performers who could have used a more cohesively assembled group of characters and histories—ultimately winds up making for an experience that, in the words of David Byrne himself, is ultimately “talking a lot, but… not saying anything!”
