“A Private Life” is a blackly comic thriller about identity. For Jodie Foster, who not only stars in the film but also speaks predominantly French in it, that was the whole appeal. For director and writer Rebecca Zlotowski, the film took on a different meaning, one rooted in her identity as a Jewish woman.
“I have strange reasons for doing the things that I make, and some of them I’m aware of and some of them are completely unconscious,” the actress told TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s 2025 Toronto International Film Festival Studio. “I don’t realize [them] until I get to the end. But it has to have some kind of personal resonance.”
In “A Private Life,” Foster plays Lilian, an American psychoanalyst living in Paris who begins to suspect that a client of hers who died reportedly of suicide may have actually been murdered. She embarks on an investigation that leads her to a hypnotherapist whose methods force Lilian to wonder whether her relationship with her client may have begun in a past life.
Foster, who studied French when she was young, had been wanting to do a film that allowed her to really test her bilingual skills. “That challenge, I was looking forward to,” she admitted. Ultimately, though, it was her character’s status as an expatriate that drew her in to the film’s script, which Zlotowski co-wrote with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé.
“[It was] something about the expatriate experience, about somebody leaving everything that they are and making that decision. It’s a big decision to say, ‘I’m going to leave who I am and I’m going to become someone else. Who am I going to become?’” Foster explained. “There’s this idea that you can escape who you are by becoming someone else, a version of yourself. I was very interested in that.”
As “A Private Life” reveals, an integral part of Lilian’s identity is her Jewishness, which is something Zlotowski, a Jewish woman herself, felt was “just the way it should be.”
“It’s so complicated.” Zlotowski observed. “Jewishness, to me, is a culture. This is the culture I was born in. It’s like literature, humor and, of course, there are also certain traumatic parts. It’s so interesting. I mean, as a French woman from Jewish culture, it’s something that is connected to my family, but also a very interesting playground. It is very interesting narratively.”
Despite the rise of antisemitism around the world, Zlotowski believes — or hopes, at least — that it is still possible to tell Jewish stories onscreen without them being viewed as inherently political.
“I hope that it’s still possible, as long as you don’t carry a political message around it, like you do not confuse Israel’s government and Jewishness,” Zlotowski said. “It’s 2025. You can deal with homosexuality without it being the message of your film. You can [have] a female character without being a ‘female-driven film.’ Yes, definitely the film deals with Jewish culture, but not about the religion or politics around it.”
The specter of antisemitism nonetheless looms in “A Private Life.” Swastikas appear in the film, and Zlotowski hopes that, if “A Private Life” does inspire some level of discussion, it be based around a theme of understanding. “If there is an impact or a discourse brought about around antisemitism, the return of antisemitism in Europe, it would be to say, ‘[Whether] through idiocy, through ignorance, through psychosis, people continue to write swastikas on our walls, but let’s continue to open the door to them and try to understand,’” she offered.
The filmmaker also does not want to dictate how people watch “A Private Life” or what they take away from it. “You can watch it on the plane and just have fun because [Jodie’s] amazing and we’ve never seen [her] speaking French! She’s like a superhero!” Zlotowski remarked with a laugh. “You can watch it as a culturally Jewish-oriented film about what’s happening in Europe.”
“You can enjoy different paths into it,” she concluded. “To me, if we succeeded at that, I would be more than happy.”
