Why a film about motherhood tested Jodie Foster in more ways than one

Jodie Foster has a very specific fame in France, on top of being famous as the double-Oscar winning star of Taxi Driver, The Accused, Contact and Panic Room. She’s the Hollywood star who speaks real French, with such a convincing feel for the language that she can dub her own voice in French versions of her films.

“I don’t want to look like a stalker, but it’s been, like, 15 years I’ve been obsessed by her,” says filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival where her film with Foster, A Private Life, had its premiere. “We all know she has this Marvel superpower.” It was Zlotowski who persuaded her to make, at the age of 63, her first French film.

What is perhaps more surprising is that Foster, who has been acting for the camera for well over 50 years, hung back from crossing the pond for so long. She says she looked, but nothing appealed before A Private Life landed on the mat.

“Unfortunately, the only scripts I got were from first-time authors, and it’s hard for me to say yes to a first-time director anyway, but to do that in French is really hard,” she says. The prospect of twisting her mouth around lines in her second language unnerved her, a frisson of awkwardness she would then bring to the character of Lilian Steiner, a troubled American psychiatrist living in Paris.

Lilian is a restive personality; we see her attention wandering as a succession of clients lie on her couch, making desultory notes about minimally traumatised personal histories that all begin to sound very much the same. The sheen of her life cracks, however, when the most unlikely of her clients, frothy Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), takes her own life. Apparently, she took an overdose of pills prescribed by Lilian. The dead woman’s husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), blames her; her daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami), who seems rather more desperate than her mother ever did, pesters her to be her confidante.

For her part, Lilian begins to suspect Paula was murdered. Actually, she wants to discover that she was murdered; her clumsy investigations becoming an obsession. She even manages to rope her former husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) into playing detective with her. Anything rather than look into the swampy hollows in her own life, a confusion of painful remnants of her Jewish identity, a prickly relationship with her adult son Julien (Vincent Lacoste) and his Gentile wife and a neurotic refusal to have anything to do with their new baby.

Even at her craziest, however, Lilian remains cool; she may get things wrong, but she will have reasoned herself into wrongness. She lives in her head; so does Foster. “It’s something I talk about quite a lot in every film I do,” she says. “That I am someone who is quite compartmentalised. A lot of modern people are. We’re not cavemen any more, you know. I find it fascinating to see how we cover our feelings, we survive and make our decisions intentionally. I like seeing all those wheels turn. For me, that’s my happiest place on screen.”

The traditional role of women in film was to play a vector of feeling. Foster has done a good deal to overturn that expectation, with films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), where her memorable FBI officer Clarice Starling goes head-to-head with a brilliant serial killer, but she was still often asked to play emotional support to a hero’s journey.

“We are supposed to be not as connected to our intellectual side. And it’s not true, it’s definitely not true for me. And it’s especially interesting as a subject for me because I have two sons.”

Kit and Charles Bernard Foster are now in their 20s. Foster is their biological mother; she parents them with her former long-term partner, Cydney Bernard, from whom she split in 2008. (Since 2014, she has been married to Alexandra Hedison.) Together, they focused on giving their sons a thoroughly normal life. They now occasionally accompany Foster to awards ceremonies and red carpet events, especially since Charles, having followed his mother to Yale, has become interested in acting. Kit went to Princeton to study sciences.

They seem a contented family, with their movie nights and long walks together, but the picture Foster paints of mothering is complicated, turbulent and precarious. “With boys, you birth a man,” she says. “You carry him for nine months, you educate him, have this very intimate, almost romantic relationship with this creature who, little by little, becomes a man who has a totally different experience in terms of the culture, where he is supposed to dominate you.”

Lilian Steiner’s fear of mothering intrigued her. “I love thinking about maternal ambivalence, which has been very present in my life. I always say I would like to have a film festival on Mother’s Day with films like We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Babadook. One of my favourite films!”

The character is recognisable in other ways. There are plenty of American analysts based in Paris, Foster says, who minister mostly to expatriates whose English is better than their French. “It’s amazing how many. I mean many, many, many. I have a lot of friends who all go to the same American therapist, living in the Place des Vosges.”

The square where Victor Hugo lived, birthplace of Madame de Sévigné, a setting chosen by Marguerite Duras: the very name of the Place des Vosges conjures every association an expat Francophile holds dear. We learn very little of Lilian’s past in the film – her Jewish heritage, in particular, erupts in troubling visions conjured by a hypnotist, but remains inert in everyday life – but Foster has assembled her own idea of her backstory. For her, the fact of expatriation is absolutely central.

“Part of the character is that she abandoned her life, left everything behind and came to France at 20 or 21 years of age,” she says. “Not just to hang around, but to do major medical studies, to get her PhD, all of the paths you would have to take to become who she is now. It is a very specific person who would want to leave their life and never look back. And who has now created a fantasy French persona, who lives in that beautiful French apartment and goes out to have coffee and cigarettes, all that idea of being Parisian that Americans bring to the equation. Why do they do that? There is something interesting in that.”

Foster’s own French education began much earlier in life. Born in California, she began working as a child model when she was three. At five, she started acting in TV shows; when she was 10, she made her first feature and at 12 she starred opposite Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, the film that propelled her onto the world stage.

Her mother was a fan of French cinema and history, but had never travelled outside the United States – “well, maybe she had been to Mexico” – before taking a bus tour around France. Foster was then nine years old. “She discovered France right then. She came back and said: ‘Right, you’re going to a French school. Some day we are going to move to France and you’ll make French movies.’ I guess it was her desire for me.” It was, Foster says now, a great gift.

Lilian Steiner treats her patients in French. Her son Julien also speaks to her only in French, which Foster sees as a kind of aggression; Lilian can never close that tiny but significant distance between them and is easily wrong-footed. She says she has watched her nephew do the same thing to her own sister. “I totally understand it. He refuses to speak the maternal language because it allows him to always be dominant. And I thought there is something really interesting about the pain of that and how she carries that with her.” Of course, he has his own resentments.

Perpetually performing the French version of herself – because there is always an element of performance to it – also puts Lilian at a distance from herself. “I am a different person in French, too,” Foster says. “My voice is higher. I can’t express myself in the same way. I’m always a little frustrated, a little unconfident, and I think that makes for an interesting character. Somebody who never knows if they’re going to be able to be competitive in terms of expressing themselves.”

Zlotowski’s film includes a multiplicity of plots, grounded in different genres. At one moment it’s a thriller, with obvious allusions to Hitchcock; it’s also a family drama and, in the final act, the play between the formerly married couple, as Zlotowski herself says, recalls the so-called “remarriage comedies” that were Hollywood’s ingenious way of getting around censorship rules in the 1940s. In America, says Foster, such a mix simply wouldn’t be allowed.

“If you make a thriller it’s got to be thrilling and the music has to be thrilling and the audience has to be scared. And it only exists in that one genre.” In Europe, she says, the auteur does what she wants.

But, despite its racy mix of whodunit, family angst and slightly tongue-in-cheek portrait of therapy culture, A Private Life appealed to Foster because it was, in fact, a conventional narrative. “Some French movies, certainly the ones we see, are kind of behaviour films where the camera follows somebody around for five days of their life. I knew I wanted to make a film with a story.”

She has directed four features herself: Little Man Tate about a child genius’ attempt to fit in (1991); Home for the Holidays, a dysfunctional family comedy (1995); The Beaver, about a tormented man who can communicate only through a puppet (2011) and Money Monster, a kidnapping thriller (2016). Reviews, even bad ones, note her ability to keep a story moving. She knew she could bring that skill to Zlotowski’s script.

Of course, Foster has had therapy herself. “I’m from California! We have done our therapy. And I’m an actor. Every actor is interested in psychology: that’s part of what we do. Psychoanalysis is very out of favour in the United States; we don’t do Freud any more. He’s a misogynist, a racist, so he’s cancelled. Cancelled! But at university” – Foster studied African-American literature at Yale, writing her thesis on Toni Morrison – “I was really interested in using the Freudian/Lacanian lens to look at literature and movies. It’s very rich.”

The analyst’s couch has also proved rich as a source and metaphor for cinema, with its promise of revelations, interpretations and other magic by the end of an allotted session. “Every generation has its own Spellbound,” says Zlotowski, citing Hitchcock’s psychological thriller from 1945. “It’s irresistible to try to understand what’s deeply inside of you, even if you lie to your therapist.” And irresistibly fun, says Foster. “Basic Instinct is the most ridiculous therapist-patient relationship ever, but we’re always fascinated by that.”

And even if people do lie, she adds, something will be revealed, even as other things are inevitably hidden. “Maybe we all lie. We’re only giving them our part of the story. We’re the victim. Or we’re the hero. That’s what we bring to the table. But Freud anticipated that. Two selfish people in a bubble together, discussing things that may or may not be true. That’s kind of what psychoanalysis is.” And kind of what cinema is, too.

A Private Life opens on May 14.

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