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There is something in every atheist itching to believe, and something in every believer itching to doubt. Writer Mignon McLaughlin explored this idea in The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, which has become a roadmap of sorts for my interpretations of the world around me, whether that be how I feel about the universe I call magic, or the beliefs programmed into or cultivated in my peers. I believe there is a certain sensitivity one can’t ignore when feeling the world around us — that our souls are slipstitched into us with sinew thread and knotted finishings. Even the most stubborn skeptic I’ve met can feel deeply and truly, which is all the proof I need of interconnectivity. Even I, who trust so deeply in the world around me, fall victim to a mindset in which I can’t fathom everything I’ve experienced — especially the bad — being totally necessary to create who I am today. This duality of thought is a roadmap I clung to when watching Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, which sees a skeptic become a believer and then fall into something miraculously in-between.
A Private Life takes us on an umbilical journey through the mind of psychiatrist Lilian Steiner, played by the inimitably brilliant Jodie Foster. After the loss of a patient, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), Lilian begins what originally feels like a monotonous, duty-laden paying of respects. When she is chased out of the wake by Paula’s angry husband (Mathieu Amalric), she begins a mourning represented by tears literally springing out of her eyes, leading her on a journey that includes a past-life regressive hypnotist and a murder mystery that may or may not be real. As the tightly woven threads of her usual skepticism begin to unravel, what we’re left with — which, to me, is much more fascinating than even the gripping mystery the film tries to sell its audience on — is a portrait of a woman learning to reopen her chest cavity and allow herself to feel deeply, not in compartments.
A Private Life is chic just as much as it is intriguing, being set in the magnificently blue-toned boulevards of Paris during a burgundy autumn. Complete with stunning carved limestone offices, fibonacci-sequence staircases, and a musical score whose dramatic stings are timed with flashes of lightning, it feels like a cozy homage to Clue and its ilk — the best kind of old detective films, the ones that knew mystery is built better with aura than red-enveloped clues.
The ensemble of this fable is laden with incredible performances, and each of the characterisations is formed through the lens of Lilian’s initial suspicion (or otherwise). Luàna Bajrami (an exciting snap-at-the-screen talent following roles in Portrait of a Lady on Fire and this year’s magnificent short Two People Exchanging Saliva) plays Valérie, Paula’s seemingly eerie daughter, whose red coat, wide brown eyes, and passion for getting help in her insurmountable grief contrasts with Lilian’s constant scowl and self-imposed uniform of a tan overcoat and cobalt turquoise scarf. (In the epilogue of the film, Lilian trades this for a cobalt turquoise jacket and tan scarf, showing that she now wears her colors on the outside.) Vincent Lacoste plays Lilian’s son Julien as the kind of barely intact new dad and cynical Frenchman who feels like the best of both worlds between his parents. The role that really blew this critic away, though, was Daniel Auteuil’s Gabriel, the indisputable heart of the film as a jolly optometrist and Lilian’s ex-husband. His slapstick-laden screen presence brings a levity to this film that is so integral to showing Lilian’s journey from tightly wound to loose — and not just through their almost-rekindling. The audience can’t help but melt at his sense of slowness and deep excitement for the world around him, having dinner at the same bistro after work every week while still being harebrained enough to investigate this supposed mystery with Lilian (including sneaking upstairs at a bookshop to steal Amazon packages addressed to a dead woman). He is, in every sense of the word, wonderful.
Despite having been previously married to Gabriel and sharing a son (and a few misguided and adorably horny kisses) with him, there is something unabashedly queer about my interpretation of Lilian. When we see her visit the past-life regressive hypnotist, we get a chance to travel through her subconscious: in her mind palace, a back-of-the-eyelids shade of red and orange, Lilian wears a white slip dress and wanders through the almost fleshy expansive maze of doors to her memory as if roaming like a child. She quickly opens and closes the memory door relating to the death of her mother (a snowy day, an armful of presents, two kids, and a car hurtling towards them), and ends up in what she feels like a past life, Foster in all her lesbian glory wearing a tuxedo and standing behind a cello. Taking the place of a man she was in a past life, she caresses the cheek of a woman Paula was in a past life, and hears her say that she’s having “his” baby. The face she makes, one of desperate joy and adoration, indicates they can’t have been purely platonic. Waking from her hypnosis session, Lilian begs the hypnotist to let her back into that state to spend more time with Paula, and from there on begins her journey to prove Paula’s death might have been a murder.
Lilian is stirred by many things: an imprint of a memory of loving a long dead version of Paula’s soul, the instinct that her death could have been at the hands of malice, her and Gabriel’s promise to stay platonic, and the words of Gabriel, Valérie, and the late Paula’s husband, who all say something about how Paula spoke endlessly of Lilian as if they were in some sort of love. The idea that someone so bound to themselves by logic and reasoning would spend days on end acting on just a thought adds to my suspicion that, had Lilian been much more honest with herself a lot sooner, there were deeply queer facets of her personality she could have discovered. This is, perhaps, the reason why her walls were built so high: so that nothing may enter.
When we exited the theater after the screening, the attendant informed us that the French Embassy had sent over wine. In the back room of the theater, plucking a red-filled glass by the stem, I gave a silent toast to Lilian — the not-quite believer, not-quite skeptic, who, despite never coming to any direct conclusions re: the truth about herself or Paula, still chose to walk forward through life more openly. May we all learn to exist, if not in direct understanding of ourselves, then at the very least, truthful and open to letting life happen to us all.
The writer would like to give special thanks to Business Iceland for facilitating this coverage.
