Jodie Foster in French Comedy

Caught between subtle comedy and foolish fluff, between Hitchcockian thriller and zany newbie sleuth caper, A Private Life (Vie Privée) is much more enjoyable than it in all probability deserves to be because of the disarming chemistry of its seasoned leads, Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil. Rebecca Zlotowski’s newest doesn’t have the intoxicating sun-kissed sensuality of An Easy Girl or the emotional complexity of Other People’s Children, her final two movies. This one is just too busy careening everywhere in the tonal map for any of that. What it does have is the French director’s customary gentle contact; it’s chaos with appeal.

Foster’s French — a minimum of to those ears — sounds impeccable and that is her first characteristic in the language since 2004’s A Very Long Engagement. She jumps into it with a spiky vitality and an sudden playfulness that buoy the film as a lot as Zlotowski’s zippy path.

Her character, Dr. Lilian Steiner, is an American psychoanalyst understanding of her residence workplace in Paris. At first look, she looks like traditional Foster materials — fiercely clever, managed, skilled, a contact guarded. But as Lilian begins unraveling, she turns into impulsive, irrational, emotional, insecure about her work and at occasions nearly ditzy.

Coming off her sensible flip because the haunted, tightly wound police chief in True Detective: Night Country, it’s a pleasure to observe Foster loosen up and have enjoyable with a job, attending to train comedy chops too seldom tapped in her American tasks of current many years.

Just the novelty of watching her act in one other language, as a girl in her adopted nation lengthy sufficient to soak up lots of the mannerisms but nonetheless markedly totally different from the locals, is a kick. And when Lilian will get flustered or irritated and mutters an occasional “motherfucker” or another expletive in English, it humanizes her, acknowledging that she doesn’t have all of the solutions.

The script, co-written by Anne Berest and Zlotowski, proper off the bat throws curveballs at Lilian to inject nagging doubts into her work. She learns that the explanation her affected person of a few years, Paula (Virginie Efira), has missed her final three periods with out canceling is that she dedicated suicide.

She’s nonetheless digesting that information, asking herself why she noticed no pink flags, when an offended affected person (Noam Morgensztern) bursts in. He aggressively informs Lilian that his many periods together with her to stop smoking have been a waste of money and time, however he kicked the behavior with only one go to to a hypnotist, releasing him from cigarettes and from her.

Lilian makes the error of going to Paula’s residence whereas household and buddies are sitting shiva. She’s ordered to depart by grieving widower Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who flies right into a rage, shouting that after all of the years Lilian had been treating his spouse, she ought to have identified one thing was improper. Later, he accuses her of over-prescribing antidepressants, resulting in the overdose that killed her.

Meanwhile, Lilian, who has by no means been in a position to cry, begins shedding tears uncontrollably, typically with out understanding it’s occurring. She consults her ex-husband Gabriel (Auteuil), an eye fixed physician whose droll response to seeing her weep for the primary time is, “It suits you.” Lilian appears on higher phrases with Gaby, as she calls him, than with their grownup son Julien (Vincent Lacoste), with whom she’s by no means been shut. That emotional block now extends to her toddler grandson.

Zlotowski inserts a humorous montage of sufferers banging on about their principally banal points whereas Lilian, mortified to look so unprofessional, dabs at her face with tissues to mop up the just about nonstop waterworks.

In a Freudian detour that’s arguably the film’s least efficiently built-in scene, Lilian tries fixing the tear duct drawback by seeing a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin), who tells her she’s in mourning and coaxes the skeptical shrink to return to her mom’s womb. Suddenly, the hypnotist is guiding Lilian by way of an unlimited pink house in one other dimension with varied doorways and stairways.

Under hypnosis, Lilian enters a corridor the place she and Paula are cellists in an orchestra recital in early Forties occupied France; Julian is without doubt one of the uniformed Nazis in the viewers and Simon conducts with a baton that turns into a gun. It’s like a stoner’s tackle Truffaut’s The Last Metro — enjoyably arch however too crazy to have a lot relevance past the hypnotist’s assertion that Lilian and Paula have been lovers in a previous life. All very Shirley MacLaine.

It does, nevertheless, cease the weeping, deal with Lilian’s disgust with antisemitism and plant a subliminal trace as to why she was by no means in a position to bond with Julian. Not that any of that’s clearly articulated.

The film is on extra accessible floor again in the true world, the place a go to from Paula’s pregnant daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) leads Lilian to imagine her affected person was murdered, both by her daughter or husband. She enlists the assistance of the amiable Gaby to begin tailing them, on the identical time listening to her recordings of periods with Paula for clues.

The principally preposterous thriller thread by no means acquires a lot substance regardless of tossing plenty of balls in the air. Someone breaks into Lilian’s condominium and steals the audio file from Paula’s last session; suspicions come up regarding an inheritance from a rich aunt (display veteran Aurore Clément, maybe a nod to Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien?); Simon picked up Paula’s medicine from the pharmacy and presumably tampered with it; and he seems to be main a double life with one other lady and a baby tucked away in Chérence, outdoors Paris.

These questions are resolved, kind of, in an anticlimactic wrap-up that yields the comparatively meager payoff of Lilian studying to be a greater listener and a extra accepting mom. But the flimsy plot turns into secondary to the fizz generated each time Foster and Auteuil share a scene — Lilian wired and Gaby supremely chill. They toss badinage forwards and backwards with an ease that rescues the film, they usually trade seems to be that time to mutual affection and want undimmed by divorce.

If the messy strands of this genre-blurring movie wrestle to cohere, the components that veer towards a remarriage comedy make it pleasant. A Private Life rolls alongside at a jaunty tempo, incessantly prodded by percussive staccato bursts of mononymous composer Rob’s whimsical rating. The shiny, handsome manufacturing looks like a throwback to French fare from just a few many years in the past — middlebrow passing for mental, mainstream business passing for arthouse. But there’s a nostalgic enchantment to it, boosted by an unlikely middle-aged rom-com dream group in Foster and Auteuil.