by Aksharaa Agarwal
A not so Vie Privée after all.
You close your eyes. In the dark, a tap on your shoulder. You turn.
Again. You open your eyes. You are lying on a couch, by a book-lined wall. Watching you, fingers steepled, a silhouette.
Many ghosts have haunted the familiar mise-en-scene of a therapist’s office…. Paula just so happens to turn into one. When her patient unexpectedly passes, psychiatrist Lillian Steiner is perplexed. She can’t shake it off. If only to absolve any culpability, she must know how, discover why. All signs point to the obvious, but then there is the tape…What should be a simple question turns out to have no simple answer.
Beginning with the jaunty chimes of The Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer‘, Vie Privée (A Private Life) uniquely balances the comedic and the suspenseful. A spirited Jodie Foster leads the charge, just as comfortable switching between French and English as she is stepping back into the memorable skin of a sleuth. And Foster’s chic, sleek Steiner is just as much at the heart of the mystery as the plot itself.
As Steiner’s search for answers turns increasingly obsessive, she is targeted, which fans the flames. Drawing further in, through the matter at hand, she is led into herself. Across several plotlines, hijinks ensue. What begins as an earnest mystery reveals itself to be an enquiry into The Investigator of The 21st century- The Psychoanalyst.
Gemmed with compelling performances in a vanishing runtime, realms of both fact and fantasy charted as current affairs and modern concerns alike are breezed by. No matter how many guesses one takes, there’s no predicting the outcome. Just take the clues- an indecipherable note, a stolen tape, and…a curling iron? Leaving few loose ends, all tangents coalesce. Afterall, psychotherapy, criminal investigation, and man’s search for meaning have one thing in common: the pursuit of truth. To discover it, one must indeed unseal a private life.
by Aksharaa Agarwal