“I wanted “Private Life” to replicate Jewish humor” | EUROtoday

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On left Rebecca Zlotowski with a household movie stuffed with emotion – the very lovely Other folks’s kids (2022). We discover it in a very totally different register with a glowing movie, stuffed with suspense, which reserves the pleasure of a Hitchcockian comedy and turns of sudden depth.

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In Privacy (in theaters Wednesday, November 26) – which the filmmaker co-wrote with the novelist Anne Berest, a few of whose favourite themes we discover – Jodie Foster is Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst established in Paris in an opulent apply.

Daily life is peaceable, the sufferers file by, and the psychologist listens, emotionless, and never all the time very centered. Until the day Lilian learns of the demise of one in all her sufferers, Paula (Virginie Efira), a shock that shakes her fully.

Suddenly, actually, this lady so admirably answerable for herself loses management. Tears flowed down her face with out with the ability to cease them. Problem which brings her to the workplace of her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) – he’s an ophthalmologist – and gives her the chance to renew the thread of a romantic relationship.

Rational Lilian then consults a hypnotherapist (Sophie Guillemin) to cease her tears and includes Gabriel in an actual police investigation. “Filming a psychiatrist,” laughs the director, “is also satisfying a deep desire, this slightly aggressive and very secret desire to say to oneself: I am better than her. »

The Point: Privacy feels like it was tailor-made for Jodie Foster. Is this the case?

Rebecca Zlotowski: Yes, totally. The writing was linked to her, this woman, this inspiring actress. Anne Berest and I sort of designed the costume on her. We built the character with her in mind and I think she recognized herself since she never, at any time, tried to distance herself from what was being offered to her.

We know why we’re looking for someone… Jodie Foster received this impulse with affection. She is in perfect control of what she sends back, of the imagination that she summons, but she also has a real desire to abandon herself to the film she is making. I saw an interview with her not long ago, which I found beautiful, where she ends with this formula: “If you want to know me, see my films. »

Basically, if we pull this thread, it is because the films protect her, she who did not want to sell her privacy at all, and at the same time, it is a way of depositing what is most secret, most intimate, most private in what is most public: a film. We agree with the very idea of ​​the title!

ALSO READ Jodie Foster: “Don’t ban works” When she seems on display screen, a complete American creativeness arrives together with her…

No doubt for that reason, for the primary sequence of the movie, I knew that I needed to take my time, a minimum of greater than I did in my earlier movies. We simply must say to ourselves: oh sure, it is her, in Paris, who speaks French… We have to present the viewer time to make this journey.

And then, we change into this story, and we do not give it some thought anymore. I discover it very lovely to see her on the age she is [63 ans, NDLR]who lets the digital camera come to her, who’s absolutely within the recreation, within the creation. It’s not so usually that we see actresses give this fact with their face, with their presence.

The movie appears stuffed with homages to characteristic movies you like. We consider Mysterious homicide in Manhattan (1993) by Woody Allen and even In the Cut (2003) by Jane Campion. Is this wished?

These are movies that I really like. In the Cut, I have not considered it, it’s very unconscious. There is certainly this identical pleasure of coming into the style, someplace between Nerves on edge And Vertigothe pleasure of taking part in with symbols, the theme of sexuality, the trajectory of a personality who believes he has mastered himself and who actually discovers himself… And it is a movie that Jane Campion wrote tailored for an actress, Nicole Kidman, even when Meg Ryan in the end performed the position.

Concerning the references that I admitted to myself, there may be certainly the Woody Allen movie Mysterious homicide in Manhattan. It’s a masterpiece of trompe-l’oeil filmmaking, as a result of the true topic, what’s at stake on this couple fashioned by Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, will not be who’s the perpetrator however: are we going to outlive our son’s departure to college? And then there may be Another lady (1988), one other Woody Allen movie which had an excellent impression on me, a superb movie a couple of lady answerable for herself and who, nevertheless, is confronted together with her restrict.

Privacy touches on the theme of Jewishness: Lilian is an American Jew confronted with the mourning of a household that can be Jewish however French…

Lilian has simply change into a grandmother, her son, performed by Vincent Lacoste, has a child however she is nearly hysterically incapable of speaking tenderness to him. This is the second when the trauma of this nearly de-Judaized American Jew, who didn’t bear the burden of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, returns within the very unusual type of this affected person who disappears.

I’m really a French lady of Jewish tradition, not of Jewish religion as a result of I’m not a believer, however culturally very Jewish. And there, I wished the movie to replicate Jewish humor, to have the one little vibrant spot on this entire heritage which is humor.

Basically, the story begins like a Jewish joke: a psychologist in tears and an ex-ophthalmologist… In any case, I like that the movie tells us that we can’t escape our generational trauma. Even although I’m a fervent advocate of the absence of determinism and absolutely the freedom to jot down one’s personal tales, there comes a time when one should acknowledge what has existed.

You used synthetic intelligence for sure scenes that are like visions, evocations of the unconscious. For what ?

For the dream sequences of Doctor Edwards’ HouseHitchcock known as on Dali. I mentioned to myself: who’s Dali in the present day? Who is it that creates completely surreal, unusual, incomplete photographs, which resemble the considered desires or fantasy? This software scares everybody however for me, it’s horrifying if we’re coping with data, not in the case of creativeness.

In an article, I got here throughout an organization that allowed folks affected by Alzheimer’s illness to create their recollections with synthetic intelligence. We give a script, which makes use of phrases, and it offers photographs, images. It’s poetic and elegant, this fashion of compensating for our failing recollections and it put me on the trail to creating these photographs like that.

Were you conscious of getting fashioned an irresistible cinema couple by bringing collectively Daniel Auteuil and Jodie Foster?

If there’s one factor I can say with out blushing that works within the movie, it is the 2 of them! I did not count on the couple to take up a lot house, it turned an important a part of the movie which was not a lot deliberate within the script, it was not a remarriage comedy like that… whereas right here, it actually, deeply is.


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On the set, a fantasy, method, humor rapidly appeared in each of them… And then, it was the assembly of the Silence of the Lambs andA coronary heart in winter, they skilled it as a problem, they loved one another within the recreation.

“Private life”drama by Rebecca Zlotowski (France, 2025), 1 h 45, with Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira… In theaters Wednesday November 26.


https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/rebecca-zlotowski-j-avais-envie-que-vie-privee-reflete-l-humour-juif-26-11-2025-2604088_3.php