In its New York City premiere in the Spotlight section of the New York Film Festival, Jodie Foster speaks French in her starring role in A Private Life. Having spoken French as a child, Foster planned to act an entire role in French for years. She finally found the right vehicle in director Rebecca Zlotowski’s capricious, ironically funny murder mystery, which also is a character study.

Foster portrays Dr. Lilian Steiner, a neurotic American psychoanalyst in Paris, whose compartmentalized, controlled life takes a weird turn. This occurs after she discovers her patient Paula (Virginie Efira), who gives no signs of severe depression or psychosis, commits suicide. Indeed, Foster’s character believes she couldn’t have misdiagnosed her, so she questions what happened.

Events cascade into chaos when Foster’s Steiner refuses to accept the suicide determination of Paula’s death and believes someone, possibly Paula’s husband or daughter, killed her. When she attends Paula’s memorial service, invited by daughter Valerie (Luàna Bajrami), Paula’s husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric), angrily evicts her from Paula’s funeral. Simon blames her for over-medicating Paula and pushing her over the edge.

His furious response to her as a terrible therapist liable for his wife’s depression and suicide dovetails with another patient’s angry response to her. The other patient claims that her expensive treatment to help him stop smoking over the years didn’t work. Instead, he engages holistic therapy, a hypnotist, Jessica Grangé (Sophie Guillemin). She helps him stop smoking in record time. Not only does he fire Dr. Steiner, eventually, he files a lawsuit against her to recoup his thousands of dollars that he spent in useless therapy sessions.

To add insult to injury that her professional career has seen better days, we discover her personal life’s problems in a reversal: physician heal thyself before you practice therapy. Divorced (she couldn’t hold her marriage together with ex-husband Gabriel [Daniel Auteuil]), Lilian visits her grown son to bond with her recently born grandson. First, Julian (Vincent Lacoste), who doesn’t seem pleased to see her, warns her not to wake the baby. Then, when he does wake, she claims she has a cold. After all, she doesn’t want to hold him and make him sick. So a potentially warm visit turns “cold” and blows up in their faces, annoying Julian.

We note Lilian’s aloofness even spills out onto her ex husband Gabriel, an ophthalmologist she drops in on because her eyes tear uncontrollably. When he pronounces that the examination shows no issues with her eyesight, we understand his care and concern for her. They remain friends probably because of Julian. However, he can’t help her unmistakable tearing up and crying.

Thus, perhaps out of initial curiosity, she seeks out her former patient’s hypnotist to get relief for her “crying.” That she seeks out the unscientific approach of a regression therapist to stop her teary eyes makes little sense. Have upsetting events (Paula’s suicide, Simon’s rage and her other patient’s fury), triggered Lilian? Rather than to reconsider her own shortcomings as a therapist and human being and examine how she contributed to the stressful circumstances, she distracts herself.

The humor comes out in the scene with the hypnotist who regresses Lilian. A hallucinatory sequence unfolds in the past taking her back to WW II and the Nazi occupation. This rational, reserved doctor accepts the hypnotist’s suggestions, after they discuss what she “saw” that relates to Paula. Suggesting Lilian had a romance with Paula in their past lives, she says this causes the crying. Apparently, she mourns Paula whom she loved during WWII as musicians in the same orchestra whose conductor was Simon.

Because Foster’s consummate acting skills elevate the scene to the edge of credulity, we follow Lilian’s acceptance of the hypnotist’s analysis, despite its ridiculousness.

As one fantastic notion leads to another, Lilian believes either Valerie or Simon murdered Paula. Since Lilian refuses to look at the prescription she wrote for Paula’s medication which Valerie hands to her as proof of negligence, we understand why she may choose to cling to the hypnotist’s analysis. Lilian would rather believe in a fantasy than examine her own actions as Valerie suggests she do. As a result she becomes obsessed with investigating foul play which involves Paula’s murder by the usual suspects, those closest to her.

Additional events occur which prompt Lilian to believe her suspicions are correct. In her adventures, she elicits Gabriel’s help after she shares her ideas with the police. Gabriel hops onboard the investigation out of love and attraction to his former wife. Together, their search for the truth becomes a caper they enjoy. As they uncover clues, this rational physician continues with the irrational in search of Paula’s murderer. Happily excited, she discovers a motive for their prime suspect. During these segments, which involve skullduggery on a rainy night, witnessing a sexual act, and searching where they shouldn’t, the director employs Foster and Auteuil’s prodigious acting talents. The humor, suspense, thrilling adventure, and resurgent romance they create between the characters engage and delight us.

The director gives a nod to classic films in the murder mystery genre from Hitchcock to Woody Allen. However, the final clue to the true circumstances are suggested by Lilian’s psychiatrist Dr. Goldstein (Frederick Wiseman). Perhaps the events she construes redirect her from the truth of the circumstances about the medication she prescribed for Paula. So what events happened and what didn’t? And what of the hallucinations and during regression and flashback visions afterward when Paula speaks to her? Which ring true?

With three or four twists, humorously sidelined by the director, eventually Lilian finds her way back to rationality. There, she meets herself coming. Also, she reconciles with family and understands how to be a better psychoanalyst in a humorous conclusion.

Foster steers the film with grace, likability and frenetic energy as the character attempts to discover a truth she has made for herself without realizing it. Eventually, she does. Thanks to great supporting performances by Auteuil and others, A Private Life delivers. The film resonates, more of a gem to revisit and appreciate than an eye-catching knockout to forget. https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff/films/a-private-life/