Jodie Foster has appeared in several French films, said David Sexton in The New Statesman – she speaks the language fluently, having attended the Lycée in Los Angeles as a child and lived in France for nine months, shortly after her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver”. But this is her first lead role in French, and “it is her casting that makes this movie, a teasing melee of genres, work – more or less”.
Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a bad-tempered Jewish-American psychoanalyst, living in an elegant apartment in Paris, but now separated from her French husband Gaby (the “ever enchanting” Daniel Auteuil).
Things are not going well for her. One of her former patients has seemingly died by suicide using drugs that Lilian had prescribed her illicitly. She is being blamed, but Lilian suspects foul play by the patient’s partner and daughter, and recruits her ex to help her with some “dodgy sleuthing”. The set-up is good, and for the first few minutes it is “hugely enjoyable and promising”, and you wonder where it’s heading: “a satire on therapy? A family romance? A murder mystery?” Alas, the film tries to embrace them all, while never quite fulfilling any.
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There are points when the story “probes potentially rich psychological territory”, touching as it does on Lilian’s suppressed childhood memories and her Jewish identity, said Philip Concannon in Sight and Sound. But ultimately, this “convoluted mystery, cluttered with red herrings and signifiers, doesn’t grip”.
Still, it is worth watching for Foster’s performance alone, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “She is Lilian through and through – and there isn’t a single scene where she doesn’t make an interesting choice or something doesn’t flicker over that face that keeps you hooked.”
