This is the most ludicrous, contrived and bone-stupid movie I’ve seen in a long time.
French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s eye-rolling mess is a textbook, teachable example of the so-called “idiot plot,” which lurches (and that’s the right word) from one scene to the next, only because each and every character behaves like a complete idiot at all times.
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| Determined to learn more about the books her suspected murderer has been reading, Dr. Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) distracts a librarian in order to steal the card with the person's check-out record. |
Zlotowski’s misfire supposedly is a “black comedy mystery thriller,” but that’s wishful thinking. The script — by Zlotowski, Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé — is incomprehensible.
I cannot imagine what prompted Jodie Foster to sign onto this turkey.
She stars as Dr. Lilian Steiner, a Jewish-American psychiatrist who sees patients in her well-appointed Parisian home. We meet two:
• Pierre Hallan (Noam Morgensztern), whose years of sessions have been an effort to quit smoking. He angrily terminates their ongoing arrangement, claiming that a hypnotist “cured” him in 20 minutes, and threatens to sue, to recover the money he wasted on his unsuccessful therapy.
• Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), who has missed her three most recent sessions. To Lilian’s dismay, she learns — from Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) — that Paula recently committed suicide. Most of the scenes we subsequently spend with Paula are flashbacks of her numerous therapy sessions.
At Valérie’s invitation, Lilian attends the subsequent shemira, but Paula’s enraged husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric) — who apparently blames her — demands that she leave.
Lilian is stricken with persistent and uncontrollable tears. She first sees her ophthalmologist ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), who is unable to help. Against her better judgment, she visits the hypnotist — Sophie Guillemin, as Jessica Grangé — which is when this film goes completely off the rails (for the first of many times).
Lilian instantly succumbs to an outlandish trance, involving white, linen-swept stairs and doors, one of the latter opening into a vision of her as a male orchestra cellist performing in Nazi-occupied Paris; Paula, a fellow musician, is “his” pregnant mistress. The conductor is Simon, who brandishes a pistol.
No effort is made, during the rest of this film, to explain such nonsense … despite Lilian’s later flashbacks to this WWII-era scenario.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Impulsively led to believe that Paula was murdered — first suspecting Valérie, then Simon — Lilian abandons any pretense of professional ethics, and breaks all manner of privacy and stalking laws, in an effort to prove this theory. Her suspicions are enhanced when somebody ransacks her apartment, clearly searching for something.
Lilian’s behavior — and Foster’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings — are that of somebody who’s completely deranged, and should be locked up for her own safety. And we’re supposed to sympathize with Lilian? Or take her seriously?
Worse yet, Gabriel eventually helps her, under equally ridiculous circumstances.
Sidebar issues include Lilian’s prickly relationship with her son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), who complains that she only visits when she needs him to order more hard-to-find blanks for the long-discontinued MiniDisc recorder with which she records her sessions.
A later dinner at Julien’s home, alongside his wife Vanessa (Park Ji-min) and Gabriel, devolves into a cringe-worthy mess when the angry, drunken Lilian forces everybody to listen to her “analysis” of her Nazi-era trance.
None of this nonsense is the slightest bit credible or believable … and if some sort of metaphor for Jewish identity was intended, it eludes me.
Foster speaks French like a native, and therefore easily “fits” the setting to that degree. (She’s highly multi-lingual, and also is proficient in German, Italian and Spanish.) Some of her scenes with Auteuil are cute, and it would be nice to see them in a conventional romantic drama or light comedy. Gabriel’s devotion to Lilian is sweet, and Auteuil radiates charm.
Alas, such sentiment is wasted in this train wreck.
Zlotowski’s directorial style often is bewildering. Her early scenes, as we get to know Lilian, are backed by a weird blend of Robin Coudert’s score elements and annoying sound effects. Perhaps this anticipates Lilian’s later instability? Who knows?
The story’s clumsy conclusion, after all this eye-rolling Sturm und Drang, is just as preposterous as everything that precedes it.
Truly amazing, in all the worst ways.
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