Film reviews: A Private Life | Blue Heron
Jodie Foster flexes her French in A Private Life, while Blue Heron proves moving, thoughtful and thoroughly original, writes Alistair Harkness
A Private Life (15) ★★★
Blue Heron (12A) ★★★★
A French-speaking Jodie Foster takes the lead in A Private Life, an enjoyably off-kilter mystery about a Paris-based psychiatrist (Foster) who starts to suspect the recent shock suicide of a patient (Virginie Efira) may actually have been murder.
Writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski sets a playful tone by needle-dropping Talking Heads’ French-tinged Psycho Killer over the opening credits. And she proceeds to make things even stranger by having Foster’s sleuthing shrink, Lilian Steiner, undergo hypnotherapy sessions — a preposterous bit of nonsense that suggests she doesn’t have as sure a grip on her own life as she previously thought. In fact, we see Lilian has a tricky relationship with her grown-up son (Vincent Lacoste) and unresolved feelings for her ex-husband (a twinkly Daniel Auteuil), whose encouragement of her private eye fantasies soon rekindles their relationship in a way that brings to mind Woody Allen’s thematically similar Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Like that film, A Private Life is more character-driven caper than a rigorous whodunnit, but Foster’s funny, weird and game performance as a psychiatrist who can’t always see what’s in front of her carries it through — and there’s fun support too from Mathieu Amalric as the husband who becomes her prime suspect.
A coming-of-age film with a difference, Blue Heron marks Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari out as a director to watch with this formally inventive, semi-autobiographical tale of a family dealing with a problem teen at a time when understanding and institutional help are in short supply.
Initially set on Vancouver Island sometime in the 1990s, it zeroes in on cute-as-a-button eight-year-old Romvari-cipher Sasha (Eylul Guven) as she quietly observes her stressed-out parents’ attempts to understand changes in her older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) — a gangly, uncommunicative teen from her mother’s previous relationship whose increasingly erratic behaviour is driving a wedge between him and the rest of the family.
A scene early on in which Jeremy turns on a light in the darkroom his adoptive dad is using to develop photos becomes a sly metaphor for the ways in which Jeremy’s compulsively disruptive presence will distort everyone’s memories of this period in their lives going forth — something Romvari uses to beautifully tee-up a mid-movie jump in time and perspective to explore how events from childhood resonate down the years. A moving, thoughtful, thoroughly original piece of work.
A Private Life and Blue Heron are in cinemas from 26 June
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