Vie Priveé – first-look review

The sight of Jodie Fos­ter speak­ing flu­ent French is the most engag­ing ele­ment of this limp and con­vo­lut­ed psy­chodra­ma from the usu­al­ly reli­able Rebec­ca Zlo­tows­ki. Fos­ter plays apsy­chi­a­trist named Lil­lian Stein­er who we meet just before she storms upstairs to tell her neigh­bour to turn down the vol­ume on ​‘Psy­cho Killer’ by The Talk­ingHeads.

Soon she receives acall from the daugh­ter of an MIA patient to say that Paula (Vir­ginie Efi­ra) is dead. Is apsy­cho killer to blame? Or is the exis­tence of akiller pure psy­chosis? Our process of dis­cov­ery is as unin­spired as the open­ing song choice.

Lil­lian is acon­fi­dent Amer­i­can expat turned bour­geois Parisian whose sta­tus and poise is expressed through her lifestyle –the stair­case she storms up is agor­geous spi­ral with wrought iron balustrades – and the brisk han­dling of the men in her life. She is as dis­in­ter­est­ed in son Julian’s new baby as she is din­ner invi­ta­tions from her ex-hus­band (Daniel Auteuil) – although the latter’s pro­fes­sion as adoc­tor comes in use­ful when she finds that her eye is invol­un­tar­i­ly weep­ing. Ahyp­no­tist tells her that she is in deep mourn­ing, while Lil­lian sees it sim­ply as aphys­i­cal annoyance.

Lil­lian dis­cov­ers the hyp­no­tist via an aggriev­ed patient who has spent eight years and €32,ooo on the couch try­ing to quit smok­ing, only to achieve this in one ses­sion and €50 with awoman who walked him through his dreams. ​“Don’t mis­take scep­ti­cism for intel­li­gence,” the hyp­no­tist tells Lil­lian, and although Lil­lian leaves with apart­ing barb, the door has already opened to apar­al­lel life in Nazi Ger­many in which she and Paula were lovers who played in an orches­tra togeth­er. Now con­vinced of ahis­toric bond with Paula, Lil­lian ropes in her ex to play detec­tive in what she sus­pects (based on scant evi­dence) is acase of murder.

The issue is not so much the var­ied machi­na­tions, for labyrinthine threads are par for amur­der mys­tery, as it is the lack of ten­sion sur­round­ing set pieces. Whether Lil­lian is stalk­ing Paula’s hus­band (Math­ieu Amal­ric) or hav­ing her apart­ment ran­sacked, the tone remains perky and untrou­bled. Per­son­al rela­tion­ship deci­sions are made with­out so much as an ital­i­ci­sa­tion from Zlotowski’s film lan­guage. Flash­backs to ses­sions with Paula are full of ram­bling details that have not been suf­fi­cient­ly well seed­ed to land as revelations.

An unwieldy script fails to account for the impact of switch­ing lanes from sedate psy­chi­a­trist to intre­pid detec­tive or the emo­tion­al scope of reunit­ing with an ex. The mys­tery itself is pow­ered by pro­sa­ic clues like ahair straight­en­er. Zlo­tows­ki is much more inter­est­ed in small char­ac­ter details that arise in the course of ordi­nary life than she is in the big reac­tions that fol­low dra­mat­ic inci­dents. There is more intri­ca­cy in the depic­tion of Jew­ish mourn­ing than in the sweep of the sto­ry. Con­sum­mate pro that she is, Fos­ter finds small moments to bring to life and Auteuil is afford­ed some charm­ing moments, how­ev­er the rest of the cast is frit­tered away in afor­get­table flick that is much more filler than killer.