French film has no clue about what kind of mystery it is

There are a “lot of loose ends,” worries one amateur sleuth midway through this elegant, intelligent but ultimately unsatisfying French film.

That’s a frustrating problem with A Private Life (in French with English subtitles). Filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children) throws out intriguing ideas and sly cinematic riffs, but the narrative lines keep flying off in all directions.

By its anticlimactic conclusion, this would-be psychological thriller is held together only by the astonishing centrifugal force of star Jodie Foster.

Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American expatriate living in Paris and working as a psychoanalyst. (Foster speaks very good French, though her character falls back on English whenever she needs to swear.)

Lilian’s world is ordered, controlled and cool. In professional terms, she seems to have become bored with her patients and their issues. She records her sessions because she doesn’t trust herself to listen when the patients are actually in the room.

In her personal life, she has been divorced for many years from Gabriel (Caché’s Daniel Auteuil) and has a somewhat aloof relationship with their adult son Julien (Vincent Lacoste from HBO’s The Seduction). She’s even uninterested in her baby grandson. “He’s always sleeping,” she explains defensively to Julien.

Lilian is shaken out of this self-enclosed existence when she learns one of her patients, Paula (Elle’s Virginie Efira), has died by suicide.

After an ugly confrontation with Paula’s widower (Mathieu Amalric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), who blames Lilian for his wife’s death, Lilian begins to suspect that Paula was murdered. She starts her own investigation, dragging in the semi-reluctant Gabriel.

Watching Foster and Auteuil, two practiced actors, as their characters navigate an affectionate, abiding but clearly complicated relationship, is pure pleasure.

Lilian and Gabriel’s sleuthing, however, is hit-and-miss.

Zlotowski, who co-scripted with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, can’t decide on an approach to their murder mystery. Sometimes the film is reaching for dark Hitchcockian suspense, and sometimes it feels like a light comic caper. And sometimes Lilian and Gabriel are just out-and-out Scooby-Dooing around.

The detective hijinkery leads to plot points that seem silly and preposterous in what is otherwise a talky, adult, very French film.

A Private Life works best as a character study of Lilian, who remains consistently compelling amidst the film’s narrative jumpiness and tonal confusion.

Lilian is so detached from her emotions that when she starts spontaneously weeping on the metro, she is convinced her tears are the result of an eye disorder rather than grief at Paula’s death.

At one point, Lilian meets up with her own former analyst (a wonderfully sly cameo by the noted 96-year-old American documentarian Frederick Wiseman), who suggests Lilian has thrown herself into a murder investigation because of her own unresolved guilt and suppressed emotions.

While the trope of the psychiatrist who has little insight into her own life and her own feelings might seem tired, the “physician, heal thyself” plotline is the best part of the film, thanks to Foster’s precise, underplayed and intensely watchable performance.

With her sharp, angular presence and her ability to convey layers of meaning with just a subtle vocal inflection or a small gesture, her work here reminds us that Foster is a star.

If only she had a better star vehicle.

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