‘A Private Life’ with public questions

French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, “A Private Life” (“Vie privée”), is a suspenseful dark comedy about Liliane Steiner, a Jewish-American expatriate and renowned psychiatrist, who begins to question herself when one of her patients commits suicide.

Steiner is troubled, so she decides to look into the circumstances of the patient’s death and begins to suspect that she’d been murdered. But was it really a crime, or did Steiner just fail to see a patient’s cry for help? With the aid of her former husband, Steiner sets out to find answers.

Ms. Zlotowski’s choice to play Steiner was Jodie Foster. For the record, Ms. Foster’s French is impeccable (at least to a writer who failed college French twice). And she does indeed give a compelling performance. But she’s certainly not my idea of a Yiddishe mama. So I asked Ms. Zlotowski if she’d considered hiring a Jewish actress — or at least someone who looks a tad more heimish — to play the role.

“I believe in fiction, in artifice,” Ms. Zlotowski told me in a Zoom call from Paris. “I believe you can play a Jew even when you’re not. You can play gay even when you’re not. And Jodie Foster has the power to play and embody anybody she wanted.”

She apologized for her fractured English, though it was not as bad as she imagined. On the subject of Ms. Foster’s embodying someone she’s not, she went on to note “In a way, to me, maybe because I’m far away from the perception you guys, Americans in the U.S., have of her. For me, she became totally Jewish. Like when we were talking about the film during prep, she would say ‘we’ for we Jews.”

Interestingly, this is the second time in our conversation she notes a difference between European and American Jews. I started the interview a few minutes earlier by asking her to speak about her Jewish upbringing and life in Paris.

“How long do you have?” she wondered.

“I was born and raised in Paris and I am the daughter of two typical, I would say European, Jews.” (She was born in 1980.) “My father was born in Poland in 1947 from Jewish parents and an Ashkenazi background. My mother was born in Morocco in ’37.” (As those dates make clear, her mother, who died young, was a decade older than her father, who still is alive.) “So I would say that I am the fruit of two aspects of Jewishness: the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi.”

She never knew her grandparents, and like many children of that generation, she never asked her parents about what they went through during and immediately after the war — and her parents never volunteered insights.

“I would say one day I imagine I will be old enough and big enough and mature enough” to seek out the information her parents had buried within, she said. But that hasn’t happened yet.

I asked if she felt any inherited trauma. That wasn’t a question out of the blue. In the film, Steiner visits a psychic/hypnotist and dreams about a previous life in Nazi-occupied Paris, a life in which she apparently knew her patient, Paula.

“Yes. Yeah. I would say that it is a pretty interesting that you even ask that question. It was something I dealt with in ‘A Private Life.’”

Steiner was an American Jew, “and when you’re a Jew In the United States, you may not have the burden of the extermination of the Jews of Europe. But when you’re a European Jew, you cannot escape from that. It’s my grandmother. My grandad. So this is pretty close to me.

“I thought I could escape those feelings hanging over me. I was born and raised in a free country, not being exterminated, not being targeted. But there’s something definitely in our bones. And the film deals with that.”

Ms. Zlotowski, who describes herself as a cultural Jew, feels antisemitism has not “impacted my career. It’s difficult for me to disconnect the discriminations I may have been targeted with the fact that I’m not only a Jew, but a woman and a Parisian, and an academic.

“There are many discriminations and you can be targeted for things and you not even know why. Maybe it’s just like we’re a pain on the ass. But I would say no, I did not experience any antisemitism.”

In “A Private Life,” Steiner; Paula Cohen Solal, the patient who commits suicide; and Paula’s family all are Jewish. But is this a Jewish film?

Between puffs of her vape — and no, she hasn’t entirely quit smoking — Ms. Zlotowski asks and answers:“What makes a Jewish film or a Jewish book? I can’t say.”

But most of her previous films “are connected to Jewish characters,” she said. “I just happen to be a Jewish person, and often in my films there is a celebration of a Jewish event, a Shabbat, or, as in ‘A Private Life,’ a Jewish funeral and shiva. That’s pretty unusual in France, because unlike in the U.S., Jewish culture is not so commonly known.

“I’m often asked why, for instance, the characters in ‘A Private Life’ are Jewish and I just reply that I’m a Jewish person, and it’s easier for me to speak of something I know quite well.”

I wondered if it was difficult directing the likes of Jodie Foster. Was she concerned that the Big Hollywood star might cop an attitude?

“I was not,” she answered. “I was privileged enough to have directed, like for instance, Natalie Portman,” in 2016, in “Planetarium.” “So it was not my first time with an A-list actress.

“Also, when you are not a famous director and you have this legend in front of you who signed up to do your film, you have to believe that something interests her, that you can work with her, and you don’t have to worry how to direct her or always wondering what she thinks. We just worked together and it turned out to be pretty fun.”

Ms. Zlotowski has high hopes for the film, but still she worries about it. “This is my Jewish part,” she said. “It’s always a question. Always self-critical.”

“A Private Life” opened in New York on January 16.