French film “A Private Life” is a lightweight thriller often toying with a number of uneasy uncertainties surrounding its middle-aged heroine. Steadily supported by its ever-reliable lead actress, the movie amuses us at times as lightly bouncing up and down along with its heroine, but it unfortunately fizzles during its last act with a little too many loose ends to my disappointment.

The heroine of the movie is Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist who has lived and worked in Paris for many years. At the beginning of the story, she is suddenly visited by one of her patients when she is waiting for the arrival of some other patient, and he turns out to have a little surprise for her. He decides to stop his session with her just because he can finally quit smoking thanks to some other therapist he recently met, and Lilian respects his decision even though she is not so pleased to learn that she has not helped him much on quitting smoking despite many sessions between them.

Not long after he left, Lillian gets another surprise news. She is notified that Paula (Virginie Efira), the patient she was going to meet at that time, recently committed suicide, and she later goes to the funeral of this patient, who is incidentally a married Jewish woman around her age. She simply wants to show condolence to Paula’s family, but neither Paula’s husband nor her daughter welcomes Lilian that much.

While she remains calm and composed as before, Lillian later finds herself gradually disturbed in one way or another. Her eyes frequently get teary for no apparent reason, so she goes to her ophthalmologist ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) for checking on her eyes, but he does not find anything particularly wrong with them. In addition, she finds herself have more questions on Paula’s death. As far as she checks on the recordings of their sessions, Paula was pretty okay besides being quite willing to talk about many things in front of Lillian, and that makes Lillian have more doubt and bafflement on Paula’s death.

In the end, Lillian decides to visit the aforementioned therapist. She is understandably skeptical at first, but, what do you know, she soon gets hypnotized, and then she finds herself wandering inside what seems to be the realm of subconsciousness somewhere inside her mind. As grasping for whatever has been repressed by her mind, she experiences what can be regarded as a memory from her former life, and she is startled to see the appearance of several people she knows – including Paula and Paula’s husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric).

The screenplay by director Rebecca Zlotowski and her co-writers Anne Berest Gaëlle Macé never clarifies what this strange moment actually means to its heroine, but it has some wry fun as Lillian becomes more convinced about whatever she experienced during that hypnosis session. She begins to believe that there are hidden connections between her and several others around her including Paula, and that certainly leads to a very awkward moment when she tells everything about her “former life” in front of her ex-husband and their young adult son later in the story.

As her psyche continues to tremble more and more, Lillian’s private/professional daily life also gets more disturbed along the story. While Paula’s daughter, who is incidentally around the age of Lillian’s son and has also been pregnant, seems to be fixated on getting any reason behind her mother’s death, Lillian begins to suspect Simon just because of what she supposedly saw as experiencing her “former life”, and her suspicion is more increased due to a series of alarming incidents happening around her. For example, somebody vandalizes her car, and she is subsequently shocked to discover that her residence is burglarized for no apparent reason.

As its heroine becomes quite obsessive about finding the truth behind her patient’s death, the movie seems to enter the area of those paranoid thriller films of Roman Polanski such as “The Ghost Writer” (2010). As a matter of fact, there is even a brief but humorous moment which is clearly influenced by the climactic scene of “The Ghost Writer”, and this is further accentuated by the presence of Mathieu Amalric, who not only worked with Polanski several times and but also resembles him to considerable degree.

It is disappointing to see that the story arrives at the finale which feels too easy and contrived in my trivial opinion, but the movie is still fairy engaging thanks to the good performance from Jodie Foster, who has lost none of her talent and presence although it has been 35 years since her iconic Oscar-winning turn in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991). Although I cannot tell how good her French speaking in the film actually is (She already tried a bit of French-speaking performance in “A Very Long Engagement” (2004), by the way), Foster looks natural in her interactions with several other main cast members surrounding her, and Daniel Auteuil and Virginie Efira ably handle each own juicy moments in the film while never overshadowing her at all.

On the whole, “A Private Life” has several glaring flaws which distracted me a bit too much during my viewing, but it is not wholly without fun and amusement at least. I still wish it had a naughtier fun with its supposedly preposterous story premise, but it held my attention up to a certain narrative point along with Foster, and I admire that to some degree.

Sidenote: There is a brief cameo appearance by Frederick Wiseman, a great documentary filmmaker who sadly passed away early in this year.