DAN WEBSTER:
Five months after it was published in 1934, Dashiell Hammet’s novel The Thin Man was made into a movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. Though Hammett never wrote another novel, MGM ended up making six Thin Man films in all. And between the years 1957 and 1959, the television network NBC ran a Thin Man series starring Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk.
Well-written, with acerbic dialogue perfectly delivered—especially by Powell and Loy—the films and later TV series set a standard for what would become a staple: male-female detective teams as seen in such series as Moonlighting, McMillan and Wife, Remington Steele and even The X-Files.
A Private Life, the French-language film directed and co-written by Rebecca Zlotowski, follows in such company—even if the humor is more subtle and the mystery, so to speak, ends up being about as light as a Jacques Pépin souffle.
What sets Zlotowski’s film apart, though, is its casting. Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American-born psychiatrist working in Paris. And the big surprise is that Foster, who learned to speak French at age 9 while attending a language-immersion school, holds her own in the language with such veteran co-stars as Daniel Auteuil and Mathieu Amalric.
Her character Lilian could be described as a difficult person. She’s methodical, more than a bit unyielding, long divorced from Gabriel (played by Auteuil) and somewhat estranged from her only son Julien (played by Vincent Lacoste). While mother and son do have a relationship, it’s a strained pairing.
Lilian’s sense of order gets disrupted when a patient she has been seeing misses three appointments in a row. It turns out the patient, Paula (played by Virginie Efira), has died by what police say is suicide. When Paula’s daughter invites her to attend the family’s service—which is the Jewish tradition of shemira—Lilian is shocked when Paula’s husband Simon greets her angrily and demands that she leave.
Concerned, and at the same time unable to believe that she might have missed something in their sessions together, Lilian reviews the audiocassettes of their conversations. “I never detected the slightest suicidal thought,” she tells her ex-husband Gabriel, an ophthalmologist whom she consults because—for reasons that she can’t begin to understand—her eyes keep leaking tears.
Thus, especially after Paula’s daughter tells her that her mother committed suicide with pills that Lillian had prescribed for her, Lilian resorts to believing the only things she can: She suspects foul play, that Simon the husband is a murderer, and she enlists Gabriel to help her prove it.
At this point, Zlotowski could have taken her film in a couple different directions. One would have been Hitchcockian, with Lilian immersing herself ever deeper into a progressively dangerous obsession. Another would have been to simulate a Pink Panther-type storyline, with all the associated quick-quip dialogue.
Instead, she—with the help of co-screenwriters Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé—resorts to something in between, though with a definite light French touch. While Lilian convinces Gabriel to indulge in actions that are both illegal and have the possibility of becoming farcical, they never stray near Inspector Clouseau territory.
Instead, the whole point of the film is for Lilian to achieve a better understanding of herself, especially in terms of accepting her limitations—even if she does so in a way that feels far more authentic than, say, an American filmmaker might have explored.
And what better American actress to capture this French resolution than Foster? Aside from Foster’s French fluency, Zlotowski has revealed in interviews that her desire to work with Foster was what made her rewrite the script in a way to accommodate the American actress’s casting.
We’ve seen Foster play every kind of character from an FBI agent to a teen sex worker. So, it feels only natural to accept her in a role that requires her to be a French version of Nora Charles to Daniel Auteuil’s Nick. Even Dashiell Hammett might have smiled at that.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.