Though clearly a vehicle for Jodie Foster and her Francophone talents, this chamber piece, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, attempts to split the difference between Christiesque murder mystery and psychological melodrama, and whether it succeeds will depend on how much the viewer wants to invest in each side of the narrative equation. For me, the mystery is underdeveloped. Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American old-school Freudian psychoanalyst who appears to have lived almost her whole adult life in Paris. Divorced from her ophthalmologist husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), and barely on speaking terms with her adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), Lillian is a bit of a cold fish. As a professional therapist she mostly cruises, recording all her sessions on mini-discs for later perusal that she never really carries out. As her patients unload themselves on her couch, she can’t be bothered with their travails, wrapped up in her own thoughts and inner conflicts. When she learns that one of her patients, an insomniac named Paula (Virginie Efira), has died, supposedly by suicide, she wakes up, as it were. Why didn’t she see it coming? The attendant guilt sends her down a deep and treacherous rabbit hole as she convinces herself that Paula must have been murdered.

The most likely suspect is Paula’s excitable husband, Simon (Mathieu Almaric), who accuses Lillian of malpractice by over-prescribing the sedatives that killed her. This suspicion is reinforced by Paula’s and Simon’s pregnant daughter, Valerie (Luana Bajram), who keeps pestering Lillian about an aunt whom Paula was particularly close to and who recently died herself. With a sizable inheritance involved and evidence that Simon has a mistress, the likely motive becomes money, but then Lillian, acting way against type, visits a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) and learns that in a parallel life she was a man who was in love with Paula during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Though Lillian’s Jewish heritage has been dormant most of her life, it becomes a matter of interest in her investigation as she learns that Paula’s aunt, also Jewish, was persecuted as a girl. 

Zlotowski works her butt off tying all these disparate plot points together into something that mystery lovers might appreciate, but it plays havoc with the story’s more intimate dramatic elements as suggested by the title. Whose private life are we looking at? Obviously, it’s Lillian’s, and as it becomes apparent that her professional approach has been mostly a failure, you are supposed to wonder what is left for her? To say that the movie eventually cops out in this regard—the awkward comic moments give it away—is to realize that it really is just a vehicle for Jodie Foster and her Francophone talents. Why else are there all these heavy duty French stars in supporting roles, including Irene Jacob and Aurore Clement, not to mention the late Frederick Wiseman as Lillian’s mentor, another American in Paris. It’s as if the movie were thought up by the showrunners of that hit Netflix series Call My Agent: More of a stunt than a film.

In French and English. Opens July 24 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

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photo (c) Les Films Velvet – Buenos Hair – France 3 Cinema