New York 2025 Review: A PRIVATE LIFE, The Adventures of an American Psychiatrist in France

Dr. Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster), an American psychiatrist living and practicing in Paris, is having a bad day.

Her inconsiderately loud neighbor insults her in French slang, one of her long-time patients, Paula, misses yet another appointment, and another patient barges in to inform her that she is bad at her job since he was able to quit smoking after visiting a hypnotist once, something he wasn’t able to achieve after eight years of therapy.

Lilian’s day is about to get even worse when she gets a call from Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami from Portrait of a Lady on Fire), who informs her that her mother has killed herself.

What follows is a mix of situational comedy and cozy mystery, something akin to Only Murders in the Building. Only the building is in Paris, therefore, Rebecca Zlotowski’s sixth feature work soaks up a very particular style of modern French eccentric comedies. Lilian has an unexpectedly strong reaction to Paula’s death, and when Valérie presents her with an unintelligible note that might or might not be a clue that her mother was actually killed, things escalate quickly as Lilian launches her own investigation.

To get it out of the way, A Private Life isn’t a great piece of cinematic art, additionally brought down by a trio of unfortunate endings. At the same time, the sum of its quirks makes it charming enough to become one of these guilty pleasures you don’t really need to deny yourself.

Foster, who quite expectedly becomes the major force driving the film, runs around the city (and later, the countryside), manically looking for clues in store receipts and Amazon packages. She is additionally surrounded and supported by a varsity team of César winners and nominees of different generations.

Daniel Auteuil is Lilian’s ever-patient ex-husband. Mathieu Amalric plays Paula’s husband with his trademark mannerisms of a man who can be both the most harmless person ever or a cold-blooded killer. Vincent Lacoste from In Bed with Victoria is Lilian’s son, with whom she, of course, has a complicated relationship.

Virginie Efira (Benedetta in Paul Verhoeven’s eponymous film) appears in flashbacks as Paula, more a vision in the minds of everyone affected by her death than an actual person. For a few minutes, Frederick Wiseman makes a memorable entrance as another psychiatrist who manages to out-analyze even Lilian.

At the core of all the eccentric chaos, there is still death and some other heavy topics, like the tenuous nature of responsibility, and the painful question of whether it equals guilt or not. In a way, Foster’s Lilian is the descendant of David Hemmings’s heroes in Blow-Up and Deep Red, or Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert in The Conversation.

Like them, Lilian suspects that the answer has already been given to her in one of her sessions with Paula, but figuring out what she really heard requires Lilian to dig into her own mind rather than listen to the tapes she painstakingly made or running around. The idea that listening to someone sort of comes with an obligation to actually hear what is being said, not the echoes of our own thoughts, isn’t, of course, the most original — but one that is also worth repeating.

Then, of course, there are those three above-mentioned finales, with none of them doing the film any favors. The first has been basically telegraphed since the very beginning, so it hardly resonates the way it was supposed to. The second is simply unnecessary, as it doesn’t add anything significant to the current status quo. The main problem, though, is the very final one, since it completely drops the irony and turns subtext into literal text, which is never a good idea unless it happens in a school assignment paper.

The question of whether an unfortunate ending really ruins a movie or isn’t all that significant is complicated and definitely bigger than anything A Private Life has to offer. More than anything, this is a Jodie Foster Special. A program where she curses in French, engages in amateur sleuthing, and eagerly participates in one of the most awkward dinner scenes in recent cinema.

After everything Foster's characters have been through throughout her career, it seems like we owe it to one of the greatest actors of the generation to enjoy being along for the ride with her, when she, for once, gets to have fun.