Jodie Foster is trying to decide whether she’s funny. The consensus among critics has generally been no. “Fact,” the film critic Mark Kermode wrote in one particularly harsh review, “Jodie Foster is not funny.”
“I thought True Detective was funny,” offers Foster now. Season four of the crime drama was about a revenge killing in remote Alaska, and Foster played an abrasive police chief. “I mean, she’s such a bitch, so awful… I thought it was funny.”
“Jodie Foster stars in her first French-language lead role in A Private Life, describing herself as 'such a Karen'.”
The 63-year-old actor is promoting A Private Life, a twisty psychological thriller about a therapist who becomes obsessed with the death of a patient. It is her first lead role in French, and she speaks the language fluently, having studied at the Lycée in Los Angeles and lived in France for nine months after her breakthrough role in Taxi Driver in 1976.
Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a bad-tempered Jewish American psychoanalyst living in Paris, separated from her ophthalmologist husband Gaby (Daniel Auteuil). The film opens with Lilian in her elegant apartment, annoyed because her upstairs neighbour is playing “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads. She ascends the spiral staircase to complain but he shuts the door in her face, muttering a French slang term that her phone translates as “cockblocker, old biddy, ball-buster, frigid, pain in the ass.”
Things get worse. One of her long-term clients, Pierre (Noam Morgensztern), quits after eight years of weekly sessions, telling her he spent €32,000 on therapy plus another €8,000 on cigarettes. Then she learns that another client, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), committed suicide using the drugs Lilian illicitly prescribed. At the shiva, Paula’s husband (Mathieu Amalric) furiously throws her out.
When she met French director Rebecca Zlotowski, Foster told her plainly that she isn’t funny. “She was like, ‘The funny thing? Not sure,’” says Zlotowski. “But Jodie IS funny. She’s funny!”
Foster shrugs. “I think I’m lighter as I get older. I think I’m willing to be lighter as I get older.” She adds: “And really the Karen in me, it’s real.” Asked if she has any Karen in her, Zlotowski protests: “Oh, you don’t have any Karen in you!” Foster insists: “Oh yeah I do. I get really mad. I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, it’s 4.45 – you said you close at five. It’s not five.’”
The film, which struggles to decide whether it is a satire on therapy, a family romance, or a murder mystery, offers many possibilities but doesn’t quite fulfil any. Still, Foster’s performance is “a performance completely without vanity”, according to critics, “with wonderful intelligence and feeling throughout.”