A Private Life

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, A Private Life follows a psychiatrist (Jodie Foster’s Lilian) as she attempts to figure out why her patient (Virginie Efira’s Paula) killed herself. Filmmaker Zlotowski, armed with a script written alongside Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, delivers a progressively tedious drama that boasts, at its core, a profoundly uninteresting mystery, and it’s clear, certainly, that Foster’s solid (and mostly French-speaking!) turn is slowly-but-surely rendered moot by the padded-out and excessively deliberate narrative. There’s just never a point, ultimately, at which one is able to work up an ounce of curiosity in or sympathy for Lilian’s efforts, as Zlotowski suffuses the proceedings with one tedious encounter and sequence after another – with the arms-length vibe compounded by a recurring emphasis on Lilian’s far-from-compelling dreams. And although the picture admittedly does contain a small handful of engaging interludes (eg Lilian and her ex-partner pursue and spy on Paula’s philandering husband), A Private Life, which runs at a woefully protracted 107 minutes, builds towards an anti-climactic closing stretch that cements its place as a palpable misfire.

*1/2 out of ****