Jodie Foster in French Comedy

Caught between sophisticated comedy and silly stuffed animals, between the Hitchcockian mystery and the wacky amateur detective caper, A privacy (Privacy) is much more fun than it probably deserves thanks to the disarming chemistry of his experienced tracks, Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil. The last of Rebecca Zlotowski does not have the intoxicating sensuality of the sun of Sun de An easy girl or the emotional complexity of The children of othersHis last two films. This one is too busy treating everywhere on the tonal card for all this. What he has is the slight customary touch of the French director; It’s charming chaos.

The French of Foster – At least to these ears – seems impeccable and it is his first feature in the language since 2004 A very long commitment. She jumps into it with a thorny vitality and an unexpected play that supports the film as much as the Zipotowski Zippy management.

His character, Dr. Lilian Steiner, is an American psychoanalyst working in his home office in Paris. At first glance, it seems to be a material with a classic foster family – fiercely intelligent, controlled, professional, a kept key. But while Lilian is starting to decline, she becomes impulsive, irrational, emotional, not very sure of her work and sometimes almost said.

Seeing from his brilliant tower as a haunted and closely coiled police chief True Detective: Night CountryIt is a pleasure to see Foster relax and have fun with a role, to exercise comedy chops too rarely exploited in its American projects in recent decades.

The simple fact of looking at her to act in another language, as a woman in her country adopted long enough to absorb many of the ways but still clearly different from the inhabitants, is a kick. And when Lilian is agitated or annoyed and mumbles an occasional “ass fucked” or another explanative in English, he humanized it, recognizing that she does not have all the answers.

The script, co-written by Anne Berest and Zlotowski, from the start, throws curve balls to Lilian to inject laneurs in her work. She learns that the reason why her patient for several years, Paula (Virginie Efira), missed her last three sessions without canceling, is that she committed suicide.

She always digests this news, wondering why she saw no red flag, when an angry patient (Noam Morgensztern) burst. He aggressively informs Lilian that her many sessions with her to quit smoking were a waste of time and money, but he got into the habit with a single visit to a hypnotist, freeing him from cigarettes and cigarettes.

Lilian makes the mistake of going to Paula while family and friends are sitting in Shiva. She ordered to go by the mourning widower Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who flies in a rage, shouting that after all the years, Lilian treated her wife, she should have known that something was wrong. Later, he accused him of prescribing antidepressants, which led to the overdose that killed her.

Meanwhile, Lilian, who could never cry, begins to shed uncontrollable tears, often without knowing that this happens. She consults her ex-husband Gabriel (Auteuil), an ophthalmologist whose funny answer to see her cry for the first time is: “it suits you”. Lilian seems better with Gaby, as she calls it, than with their adult son Julien (Vincent Lacoste), with whom she was never close. This emotional block now extends to her grandson in infants.

Zlotowski inserts a funny mounting of patients who strike their mainly banal problems while Lilian, mortified to appear so little professional, hides on her face with fabrics to mop up the almost non -stop water.

In a Freudian detour which is undoubtedly the least integrated scene of the film, Lilian tries to solve the problem of the lacrimal canal by seeing a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin), who tells him that she is in mourning and cashew the skeptical narrowing to return to the uterus of his mother. Suddenly, the hypnotist guides Lilian through a large red space in another dimension with various doors and stairs.

Under hypnosis, Lilian enters a hall where she and Paula are singles in an orchestra recital in the early 1940s, occupied France; Julian is one of the Nazis in public uniform and Simon drives with a stick that becomes a firearm. It’s like a point of view to Stoner on Truffaut The last metro – Archably well arc but too completed to have a lot of relevance beyond the affirmation of the hypnotist according to which Lilian and Paula were lovers in a past life. All very Shirley Maclaine.

However, he stops crying, addresses Lilian’s disgust for anti -Semitism and plants a subliminal index to explain why she was never able to bind with Julian. Not that all this is clearly articulated.

The film is on a more accessible field in the real world, where a visit to the pregnant girl of Paula Valéririe (Luàna Bajrami) leads Lilian to believe that her patient was murdered, either by her daughter or her husband. She enlisters the help of the livelihood Gaby to start doing them, listening to her session recordings with Paula at the same time for clues.

The mainly absurd mystery wire never acquires a lot of substance despite a lot of many bullets in the air. Someone enters Lilian’s apartment and steals the audio file of the last Paula session; The suspicions occur concerning a heritage of a rich aunt (the veteran of the Aurore Clément screen, perhaps a nod to Louis Malle Lacombe, Lucien?); Simon picked up Paula’s medicines in the pharmacy and perhaps falsified; And he seems to lead a double life with another woman and a hidden child in Chien, outside of Paris.

These questions are resolved, more or less, in an anticlimatic combination which gives the relatively skinny gain of Lilian learning to be a better listener and a more acceptable mother. But the fragile intrigue becomes secondary to petizz generated each time Foster and Auteuil share a scene – Lilian Wired and Gaby supremely cold. They throw the drool from front and back with an ease that saves the film, and they exchange looks that indicate a mutual affection and a desire not divorced by divorce.

If the disorderly components of this genus blue film fight to coherent, the parts that live towards a remarriage comedy make it pleasant. A privacy Roll at a crucial pace, frequently pushed by percussive staccato gusts of the whimsical partition of the mononymous composer Rob. The brilliant and beautiful production looks like a return to the French rate a few decades ago – the passage of the Middlebrow for the intellectual and general public commercial passage for Arthouse. But there is a nostalgic appeal, stimulated by a Rom-Com Dream-Com in an unlikely intermediate age to Foster and Auteuil.