It’s all a bit silly, really. Jodie Foster plays Dr Lilian Steiner, a Jewish-American psychiatrist, and she speaks in French here, sprinkled with the occasional English swearword. (Foster has been speaking French since childhood. She used the money from Taxi Driver to buy an apartment in Paris, and it has been her second home ever since).
Dr Steiner’s practice isn’t going well. A long-standing patient is angry with her for stringing out his appointments for years, after a single session with a hypnotherapist cured him of his smoking habit. Another patient, Paula, has committed suicide- so it is said- and the family blames her. She finds herself unable to stop crying, so she has an appointment with the hypnotherapist who was so successful in curing her ex-patient of nicotine addiction. Under some very rapid hypnotism, she falls into a sequence in an orchestra where she and her patient Paula are lovers, shot by Paula’s husband, and Nazi henchmen, led by her son, invade the orchestra pit. All rather strange.
Moreover, the now dry-eyed Dr Steiner begins to suspect foul play in her patient’s death. First she thinks that Paula’s daughter murdered her, and then she turns her suspicions on her patient’s philandering husband who stood to benefit from his inheritance from Paula, which had been bolstered by a legacy she had recently and conveniently received from her aunt. And so Dr Lilian goes on her hunt for evidence, dragging along her ex-husband Gabriel, and together they indulge in some amateur sleuthing which I think finally resolves the mystery of Paula’s death. Along the way she falls in love with her ex-husband again, and embarks on a better relationship with her son. (Really, she’s a pretty crap mother and grandmother).
It was okay, although it felt longer than its 103 minutes. Jodie Foster was very good, although during the movie she seemed to transmogrify steadily into Julia Gillard. It was a bit silly, though
French, with English subtitles.
My rating: 3/5
Watched because: I was interested to see Jodie Foster acting in a French film.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 