‘A Private Life’ is fascinating on several levels, not least because it gives us the unusual pleasure of watching Jodie Foster speaking impeccable French as an American psychiatrist who has made her life in France but never quite feels as though she belongs there. There is a subtle outsider quality to Lilian Stein that informs the entire film. When one of her young patients dies, she becomes convinced that it was not suicide but murder, with suspicion falling, perhaps, on the patient’s own daughter. What begins as a psychological drama gradually turns into a detective story.

There are unmistakable echoes of ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ in the way a trained professional believes she can intuit the truth from a handful of clues, only to discover that she is, like J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in ‘Chinatown’, increasingly out of her depth. Lilian recruits her former husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), an ophthalmologist, to help with the investigation. The pair remain on affectionate terms, and there is a lingering sense that their relationship might yet be rekindled. It recalls the dynamic between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’, where an ordinary investigation becomes a means of rediscovering one another.

As the mystery deepens, Lilian herself begins to change. A woman who has spent her career analyzing other people’s minds is forced to confront her own emotional detachment. She seems incapable even of embracing her baby grandson, and her search for answers leads her into unexpectedly spiritual territory, including sessions with a hypnotist and reflections on past lives. Perhaps this is driven by guilt, a desperate attempt to compensate for the warning signs she now believes she failed to recognize in her patient.

What makes the film especially intriguing is its portrait of a psychiatrist who, despite all her professional expertise, does not understand people nearly as well as she imagines. She repeatedly misjudges situations, interrupts conversations and overlooks important emotional cues. Indeed, she records therapy sessions not because of clinical protocol, but because she realizes she has not listened carefully enough the first time and must revisit what she has missed. It is a subtle but revealing inversion of the therapist’s role.

There are shades too of ‘The Conversation’. Like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul, Lilian becomes consumed by other people’s lives, convinced she can decode hidden truths while never quite grasping the bigger picture. The investigation is almost secondary to the portrait of a woman whose confidence in her own judgement is steadily eroded.

At times, however, the film feels rather slight. It has the appearance of one of those glossy psychological thrillers of the 1990s in which highly educated professionals, surrounded by elegant apartments, books and carefully curated interiors, become entangled in mysteries they are ill-equipped to solve. Yet ‘A Private Life’ is ultimately less interested in suspense than in self-knowledge. It asks whether we can ever truly understand another person when we struggle to understand ourselves, and whether professional expertise can ever compensate for the simple act of really listening. It is an intelligent, understated character study that occasionally lacks dramatic urgency but remains absorbing because of Jodie Foster’s beautifully restrained performance at its centre.