The TIFF Film Review: A Private Life
By Ross
Jodie Foster delivers a captivating performance of rare precision, vulnerability, and grace in “A Private Life“, a French-language drama that examines the quiet collapse of a psychoanalyst’s inner world after a more profound collapse of a patient. As Lilian, a therapist who has somehow lost her ability to listen — not just to her patients, but to herself — Foster (“The Accused“) gives us a portrait of someone adrift in the very medium through which she once navigated the human psyche. It’s a career-defining turn, executed entirely in French, spoken with a clarity and musicality that underscore both her intellect and her isolation.
Writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski (“Grand Central“) builds the film around stillness — those long, hovering pauses where thought teeters between understanding and avoidance, and slices it with tension and interrogation. The film’s humour and wildness recall Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery“, though with a distinctly French sensibility: conversations laced with irony and emotional precision, intimacy served up with playful restraint, bravery mixed with wanton zealousness. Daniel Auteuil (“Caché“), as Lilian’s ex-husband Gabriel, brings an easy warmth and connectivity that plays beautifully against Foster’s taut composure; their scenes together glide with the elegant familiarity of two people who have long since stopped trying to surprise each other. Yet, here they do, sexily and progressively.
Beneath the wit and Parisian polish, “A Private Life” is a study in fear and disconnection — not the fear of failure, but of genuine closeness and honesty. Lilian’s estrangement from her son, now a father himself, mirrors her professional paralysis. The woman who once listened for a living cannot stay present in the simplest moments of connection: holding her grandchild, sharing a meal, hearing her son speak without analysis. The film traces her slow, halting return to emotional contact through surprising tears, and with cinematographer George Lechaptois’s camera lingering just long enough to capture the tremor of avoidance, we see that flickering across Foster’s face before she lets herself stay in the room.
By its final moments, “A Private Life” transforms from a psychological mystery into something gently redemptive — a film about the courage to listen again. Foster’s Lilian doesn’t find salvation through insight or theory, but through presence: sitting beside her son, holding his baby, breathing the same air without the need to interpret it. It’s a quiet moment, but it lands with immense emotional force. Clever and warm without ever tipping into sentimentality, “A Private Life” reminds us that sometimes the most radical act — in therapy, in love, in life — is simply to remain present and engaged.
