Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

If Jodie Foster was your therapist, would you maintain doctor/patient boundaries? Or would you try your best to flirt? Would your partner seethe with jealousy whenever you spoke of her? Would you dream of a connection that transcended the couch, transcended time itself? Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life presents a sort of twisted wish fulfillment for lesbians everywhere: Jodie Foster is your therapist and she’s taken on your death as her personal cause.

Foster plays Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist whose life and practice have long been in Paris. When her patient of nine years (Virginie Efira) suddenly dies by suicide, she begins to suspect the true cause might be murder. Her time playing detective leads her to reconnect with her ex-husband, confront a fractured relationship with her son, aaaand to a hypnotist who suggests Lilian and her patient were lovers in a past life, Lilian impregnated her, and then the patient died tragically in Nazi-occupied France.

The last few years have brought a renaissance of sorts for Foster who secured an Oscar nomination for NYAD and an Emmy win for True Detective: Night Country. Her work here is even better. As a rational woman spiraling into the irrational, Foster is remarkable. She plays the film’s shifting tones perfectly adding humor and pathos often to the same moments. Even when the plot loses focus, Foster grounds the film reminding the viewer that the genre stylings and past life hijinks are cover for a simple human story.

The last time director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski teamed up with an English speaking movie star, she gave Natalie Portman one of her few masterpieces with the underrated Planetarium. There’s a freedom and an intimacy to Zlotowski’s work that these stars would be hard-pressed to find in Hollywood. It opens something up in them bringing out their very best.

In general, Zlotowski’s work is often taken for granted. Other than her bombastic scores and soundtracks — Talking Heads’ “Psychokiller” is used particularly well here — Zlotowski approaches cinema with a gentle touch. There’s a lightness to her work, even when dealing with suicide and murder, its depth and devastation hidden in only a couple lines of dialogue or a single frame.

Her previous film, Other People’s Children, explored the connection between a woman and her boyfriend’s daughter. Here, she takes on another intimate relationship that’s hard to define: the one between a therapist and their patients. There’s a fascination with the way someone can know another person so well and yet not at all. Zlotowski seems to suggest this speaks to something beyond psychiatry: Can anyone really know the entirety of another?

Lillian’s mystery-solving ultimately does more to restore her former heteronormative bliss than to open up reincarnated queerness. But the lack of on-screen queerness is less important than one of our great living queer performers receiving a role with this much depth and opportunity. And how straight can a movie really be if it’s about the blurred boundaries of therapy with a gender-swapping time traveling romance?

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