There is something uncanny about Rebecca Ziolowski's Vie Privee (A Private Life), indeed, even a faint whiff of the supernatural. Throughout picture, the movie suggests that it is about to eschew realism for dream -- the precise, sleek images appear to be on the verge of unraveling into some sort of occult, private revery. The film's imagery and plot suggest Alfred Hitchcock (specifically his psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound), as refracted through the cinema of Jonathan Glazer, the director of Birth, Sexy Beast, Under the Skin and Zone of Interest. There is, in fact, a direct connection in the film to the Holocaust, the subject of Glazer's last-named picture. The peculiar amalgam of cinematic styles gives A Private Life (2025) an odd resonance that creates a mysterious, and strangely eerie effect on the viewer. A Private Life, in fact, is reticent -- it suggests far more than it shows and the viewer is left to assemble the picture's discordant episodes, many relying upon misdirection, into a coherent whole. And, yet, fragments remain out-of-place, insoluble as it were. In one dream sequence, the heroine Lilian Steiner is under hypnosis and encounters a door in her vision that she is afraid to open. She cracks the door a little, revealing what seems to be a sliver of a bright white Winter scene, but, then, shuts the door in dismay, muttering that she is not going there -- the implication is that the hypnotic trance has revealed something hideous or alarming about her past that has been deeply repressed. Toward end of the picture, as the plot threads are pulled together, we see a shot of a woman from the back standing in the wintry Central Park in New York; the woman's face isn't shown -- there are two gifts and two little girls identically dressed next to her. The sunshine is bafflingly bright. The image seems to refer back to the hypnotic trance 70 minutes earlier in the film. Whatever Lilian was unable to face, she has now brought to mind -- but we never are told the significance of the door that she pushes shut in a sort of panic or this disconnected image, apparently from the distant past. A Private Life is a very complex and ambitious film and it poses certain mysteries that it refuses to solve.
Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster speaking French) is a Paris psychoanalyst. She's Jewish and an old-style therapist who asks her patients to free-associate and has them recline on a couch. She's divorced: her ex-husband is named Gabriel and an ophthalmologist. Lilian is accosted by a disgruntled ex-patient who says that she has cheated him by charging for 8 years talk therapy so that he will quit smoking. (It's obvious he's disturbed and his therapy has evolved into something far beyond curing him of his smoking addiction.) The ex-patient says he went to a hypnotist who gave him a suggestion under hypnosis to stop smoking and, for 50 francs, his problem is solved. He wants his money back and threatens litigation. Steiner, then, learns that a patient she saw the preceding week has committed suicide. Lilian attends the wake of the Jewish patient, an attractive forty-year old woman. The family is appalled at her presence and drives her away from the Kaddish ceremony. Lilian can't believe her patient killed herself and suggests she was murdered. She goes to the hypnotist who solved her patient's smoking problem. Although she resists at first, Lilian allows herself to be hypnotized. Under hypnosis, she sees a concert in which an orchestra in occupied Paris are preparing to play Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. The dead woman is playing cello and Lilian sits next to her with a violin. The dead woman's husband is directing the orchestra and the audience is full of Nazis, one of which is her son from whom she is estranged. (Her son has a baby and Lilian is conspicuously remote and cold to both her son and the infant.) The dead woman says she is pregnant and Lilian is the father of the child. Her husband, sets aside his baton, takes a gun from his pocket and shoots the dead woman killing her a second time. When Lilian emerges from her hypnotic state, she is convinced that the dead woman was, indeed, murdered by her husband. She tells this to her ex-husband who is interested in her account and decides to help her discover the truth about the dead woman's suicide -- was it suicide or murder? Lilian, with her ex-husband with whom she is now having sex, track the man (the widower) to a small village where he seems to have a mistress and a "double life" -- Lilian believes that he had a motive to kill his wife and, acting on that suspicion, begins assembling evidence. As it turns out, the dead woman's aunt has also recently passed-away -- the aunt was very wealthy and her largesse has descended upon the niece said to have committed suicide. The Aunt's name was Perle Kinder -- so Lilian interprets the hypnotic episode as signifying by the Mahler music that someone first killed Kinder (Kindertotenlieder) and, then, murdered her patient for the Aunt's fortune. The woman's husband, who has a spooky appearance and seems hysterical, is the chief candidate for assassin in this scheme
The plot is very complex and I won't spoil its many twists and turns. The question that the movie poses is whether Lilian has become crazy herself -- did guilt associated with her patient's suicide cause her to configure the elaborate murder plot as an excuse for her failure to detect that her patient was suicidal. The alliance between ex-husband and Lilian has a gee-whiz gung-ho aspect that reminds me of a Hardy Boys mystery -- there's a David Lynch flavor about the couple's enthusiastic attempt to pin blame for the murder on the patient's odd-looking husband. Some of the film is comical, for instance, the subplot about the patient angry about the talking cure for smoking. The film is edited in a discordant fashion - sightlines don't match and mirrors confuse the eye: are we looking at something real or reflected? The logic between cuts is often obscure and we go through much of the movie slightly baffled and unclear as to what is going on. There are many night shots that are stylized -- we see the faces of principals standing out as little bubbles of blue or grey color in a field of complete and utter darkness. Locations seem sinister, a library, for instance, that is supervised by a paralyzed dwarf with glacial busts of Roman emperors, a strange ferry crossing a river (Styx?), elaborate spiral staircases shot vertically to emphasize the whorl of the steps -- these shots look like Hitchcock, particularly the spiraling forms in Vertigo and Spellbound. The hypnotist, a matronly woman, somehow knows way too much about what is going on. She regresses Lilian back to the womb, a strategy that makes Lilian roll her eyes until the heroine droops into the hypnotic state and seems to be paddling about in a flood of amniotic fluid in a red cave. The music on the soundtrack is also incongruous -- David Byrne singing "Psycho Killer" with its interpolated French words and, at the end, J. J. Cale performing "Don't Go to Others."
Jodie Foster, of course, is memorably brilliant as the resourceful but half-crazed psychiatrist. (The actress attended a French-speaking High School in LA and delivered the Valedictorian address in French -- here she's playing an American woman who speaks French throughout the entire movie. She's hurt that her estranged son has elected to study German and not American English, the tongue that his mother speaks.) Foster looks gaunt and her face is trenched with wrinkles particularly around her mouth and chin. The camera doesn't flatter her and she seems to have no problem looking like an old woman in this movie -- in fact, her pointed features and fox-visage are, if anything, filmed to look more witchy than she probably appears in real life. There is a good joke. The aggrieved ex-patient says that Sigmund Freud abandoned hypnosis as a therapy when he learned that the talking cure would take years to implement. Lilian sneers at this theory and says: "That's borderline anti-Semitic." The patient is very angry. "I'm no anti-Semite," he says. "I used the word 'borderline'," Lilian replies.
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