Private life on Canal Plus: Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil, irresistible with mischief (review)

After the masterful The Children of Others, Rebecca Zlotowski returns with a more confusing film where an apparent Cluedo hides a mischievous comedy of remarriage.

Presented last year at the Cannes Film Festival, Private Life marks Jodie Foster’s big return to French cinema, more than 20 years after A Long Engagement Sunday. Rebecca Zlotowski’s film is broadcast for the first time this Friday evening on Canal Plus, and can be streamed on MyCanal. Our review:

We anticipated it when it came out three years ago and Private Life provides confirmation. In Rebecca Zlotowski’s cinema there is a before and after The Children of Others, her greatest success to date. The first time she dared to crack the armor, letting a disheveled romanticism and skin-deep emotion take the place of a previously dominant cerebrality. It is from this breach that Private Life is born, undoubtedly his most disconcerting film to date. The one where what his characters experience on the screen – this difficulty in distinguishing truth from falsehood – dialogues with the way in which he himself metamorphoses throughout the story.

At its beginning, Private Life indeed has the appearance of Cluedo, in the footsteps of Lilian, a renowned psychiatrist who becomes convinced by the sudden death of one of her patients that it is a murder and decides to carry out her own investigation. Except that little by little, this hunt for the killer will turn into a comedy, taking on a burlesque or even completely pernicious side – notably in scenes of hypnosis which lost members of the Première editorial team en route – before taking its true form. A real comedy of remarriage, born from the adventures that Lilian goes through with her ex-husband with an ophthalmologist, a partner becoming more and more involved in her investigation.

There is an infinite malice in this gesture, that which characterizes the duo formed by Jodie Foster (in her first French film since A Long Engagement Sunday) and Daniel Auteuil, particularly generous, inventive and playful in each of their scenes. Their complicity bursts through the screen.

By Rebecca Zlotowski. With Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira… Duration 1h45.