Jodie Foster masters the language in this French film, but something’s missing
Mannered performance: French audiences have warmed to Jodie Foster in A Private Life. Photo / Supplied
A Private Life, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, is in cinemas now.
When speaking a foreign language, some linguists take to curling their embouchure into unfamiliar shapes, which can look a little strange but helps to sound more authentic.
Jodie Foster is admirably fluent in the language but in her first proper French-speaking movie, her acting is less subtle than you might expect. In a story that’s very much a throwback to 90s European psychological thrillers, falling somewhere in tone between Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and François Ozon’s Double Lover.
Foster play Lilian, a psychotherapist investigating the purported suicide of a patient (played in flashback by Virginie Efira) because of her hunch she was murdered and thinking there may be a clue in her recordings of their sessions.
Of course, it’s the shrink who turns out to be neurotic for her own deep-seated reasons, and her sessions with a hypnotherapist cause her to fall into a strange and unsettling memory lane.
Foster’s language skills are impressive but her heroine comes off as overly mannered and occasionally unhinged, which may be the fault of writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children). The dated, thriller-ish tropes are not assuaged by a cast of famous French faces: Mathieu Amalric and Irène Jacob co-star, and Lilian’s doctor ex-husband is played by Daniel Auteuil.
That said, French audiences have taken to the film, evidently less perturbed by a story that descends into mystical dreams and hypnotic visions before its preposterous denouement. It’s clear something got lost in translation.
Ratings out of five: ★★½