Only those who believe in reincarnation, dibbuks, or daddy Freud won’t have fun watching the mysterious almost-murder mystery A PRIVATE LIFE. At the center of the film is the fabulous Jodie Foster in the role of Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American in Paris, a cool, tough, and very successful psychoanalyst working with her primarily Jewish clientele. Until now. But there’s one aggressive patient who complains because despite the thousands of euros and hundreds of hours spent on her couch, he still hasn’t quite smoking.

She herself smokes like a chimney and swears an awful lot too. She is only closely connected to her cellphone, And the camera's view into the spiraling stairwells also suggests that things will not continue so straightforwardly in the doctor’s life.

Secondly, there’s her patient Valérie, whose mother committed suicide. But was it suicide or murder? And who did it? Paula’s husband? And to what extend is Lilian at fault? And finally, there's problem number three: a watery eye. It’s watering for no reason, but constantly.

The therapist embarks on a search for clues and goes to therapy herself, resulting in her going back to the past, to German-occupied Paris, where she discovers that her son Julien was an SS officer in his former life. But because of her eye, she seeks Gaby's advice. He’s an oculist and also her ex husband. The equally fabulous Daniel Auteil plays him and helps her search for the murderer, if there is one. Skeptical, amused by the escapades of his former wife, amazed, and loving, he follows her into the unknown – and so a love story develops alongside the mystery, a genre in which director Rebecca Zlotowski has so far been successful in.

Elisabeth Bauschmid (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Levy