A Private Life: A train wreck

A Private Life (2025) • View trailer

No stars: TURKEY. Rated R, for graphic nudity, sexual content, profanity and brief violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.8.26

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.

 

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.

This also is yet another example of a longstanding cinematic truism: With very rare exception, a film that begins in a psychiatrist’s office is guaranteed to be a stinker. 

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.

 

The Phoenician Scheme: Droll lunacy

The Phoenician Scheme (2025) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, bloody images and mild sexual material

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Whether working with actors or animation, writer/director Wes Anderson is his own unique brand of crazy.

 

When everything clicks — as with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox— the results are imaginatively marvelous.

 

Yet another in-flight assassination attempt forces Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro, left) to
take control of the plane, while Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and Bjorn (Michael Cera) watch
with mounting horror.

But when Anderson’s signature tics and mannerisms overwhelm the material — see Asteroid City, The French Dispatch and The Darjeeling Limited — we’re left with something dire and (for many viewers) utterly unwatchable.

This one’s somewhere in between.

 

For starters, it’s refreshing to see that Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola have delivered an actual plot that drives the wacky action (something sorely missed in Asteroid City). Granted, it’s a dog-nuts plot, but it makes sense, and gives the primary characters genuine motivation. 

 

Anderson also tackles some weighty concepts along the way: legacy, mortality and the final reckoning that results from one’s confrontation with God.

 

God, of course, is played by Bill Murray. Who else?

 

The art direction and production design — by Stephan O. Gessler and Adam Stockhausen, respectively — are spectacular. The latter has worked on every Anderson film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, and he won a well-deserved Academy Award for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

The wildly distinctive look of an Anderson film has become legendary. His characters inhabit often static environments that sometimes feel like gigantic doll houses, with theatrical-style backdrops and finely tuned details that don’t quite exist in our workaday world: more like hyper-reality. Anderson favors color schemes in earth tones and soft pastels, which — in this case — occasionally are interrupted by Heaven’s blindingly white monochrome.

 

Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel constantly plays with cockeyed camera angles and forced perspective; one early sequence is entirely a ceiling’s-eye view.

 

All of this establishes another of Anderson’s highly mannered, theater-of-the-absurd narratives: a style you’ll either embrace as cheerfully silly ... or dismiss as ludicrous.

 

The time is the 1950s. Zsa-Zsa Korda (a hilariously deadpan Benicio del Toro), a notorious plutocrat industrialist loathed throughout the world, is introduced mid-flight, as a bomb explodes in the rear of his private plane. He survives the subsequent crash: the sixth recent attempt on his life by unknown parties.

 

His gargantuan business empire also is under threat via financial scrutiny and political pressure, most particularly — at the moment — his complex “Phoenician Scheme”: an interlocking series of railway, shipping, mining and agricultural ventures designed to dominate a (fictitious) Middle Eastern country. This venture has been jeopardized by the U.S. government’s market-manipulating act to exponentially increase the cost of the “bashable rivets” necessary for all elements of Korda’s complicated plan.

 

He therefore must persuade each of his investors to accept less profit than contractually promised; each meeting becomes its own distinctive chapter.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Taking Flight

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) • View trailer
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for nudity, sensuality and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.1.08

The blurry, eye-blinking, where-am-I point of view scene has been a cinema cliché for decades, as countless directors have put us briefly into a protagonist's head while s/he struggles to consciousness.

Here's the moment we spend the entire film waiting to see: Claude (Anne
Consigny) holds the completed book that she and Jean-Dominique Bauby
(Mathieu Amalric) have spent painstaking months to "dictate" and transcribe.

The next image is equally inevitable: the gradually sharpening close-up of a smiling lover, a worried doctor or a smirking villain. Then standard movie technique resumes, and we're once again in the land of multiple cameras and standard establishing shots.

Not for director Julian Schnabel.

He opens his new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, with just such a sequence, as Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, perhaps remembered as the French information broker in Munich) battles for awareness after having been in a three-week coma. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski — a two-time Academy Award winner, for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan — metaphorically places his camera inside Bauby's skull; we therefore share the man's disorientation as doctors, nurses and orderlies swim in and out of focus.

But it doesn't stop: Schnabel maintains this harrowing point of view, trapping us within Bauby's head just as he was, in reality, fully cognizant while being entombed within his own body.

This is a true story, and far more faithful to actual fact than most films making that claim these days. Bauby was a 43-year-old author and editor of the leading French magazine, Elle, when he was felled by a massive stroke. All at once, his exciting lifestyle — devoted father to adoring children, loving son to his own aging father, new boyfriend to a sensuous young woman quite typical of his glamorous world — came to an abrupt halt.

Bauby hit one of Fate's cruelest jackpots: He recovered consciousness to learn that he was victimized by an extremely rare condition known as "locked-in syndrome." Almost completely paralyzed, he nonetheless quickly regained his sensibilities but had no way of caring for himself, and almost no way of communicating with the world outside his own thoughts.

He could flutter his left eyelid. That was it.