Skip to content 
In every atheist there is something to believe, and in every believer there is something itching to doubt. Writer Mignon McLaughlin explored this idea The notebook of the second neuroticWhich has become a guide of sorts for my interpretations of the world around me, whether it’s my sense of the world I call magic or programmed into beliefs or cultivated in my peers. I believe there is a certain sensibility that cannot be ignored when we feel the world around us – that our souls are clothed in thread and yarn. Even the most stubborn skeptic I’ve met can feel deeply and truly, which is all the evidence of interconnectedness I need. And I, who trust so deeply in the world around me, fall prey to a mindset that fails to recognize that everything I’ve experienced—especially the bad—is absolutely necessary to make me who I am today. This duality of thought is the road map I followed while watching Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film. personal lifewhich sees a skeptic become a believer and then fall into something miraculous.
,
personal life It takes us on an umbilical journey into the mind of psychiatrist Lillian Steiner, played by the inimitably brilliant Jodie Foster. After losing her patient, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virgin Efira), Lillian embarks on what at first feels like a monotonous, duty-laden respect. When she is kicked out by Paula’s angry husband (Mathieu Amalric), she begins to mourn, represented by literal tears from her eyes, leading her on a journey that includes a past-life regression hypnotist and a murder mystery that may or may not be real. When her usual tightly woven threads of skepticism are unraveled, what we’re left with—which, to me, is far more fascinating than even the charming mystery the film tries to sell its audience on—is a portrait of a woman learning to reopen her chest cavity and allow herself to feel deeply.
,
personal life It’s as elegant as it is intriguing, set in the brilliant blue tones of Paris on the boulevards during a burgundy fall. With stunning carved limestone offices, a Fibonacci staircase and a musical score whose dramatic crackles are punctuated by lightning bolts, it’s like a cozy homage to Clue and its ilk – the best old detective movies that knew a mystery is better built with aura than red envelopes.
,
The ensemble cast of this tale is loaded with incredible performances, and each characterization is framed (or otherwise) through the lens of Lillian’s initial suspicion. Luana Bajram (an exciting screen talent who plays the roles of Portrait of a lady on fire And this year’s brilliant short Two people exchange saliva) plays Valerie, Paula’s seemingly terrifying daughter, whose red coat, wide brown eyes, and penchant for helping the insurmountable bereaved contrast with Lillian’s constant snark and form-fitting coat and cobalt turquoise scarf. (In the film’s epilogue, Liliane changes this to a cobalt turquoise coat and tan scarf, showing that she now wears her colors on the outside.) Vincent Lacoste plays Liliane’s son, Julien, as a barely intact new father and cynical Frenchman who feels like the best of his world. The role that really destroyed this critic was Daniel Otis Gabriel, the undisputed heart of the film, as the cheerful optometrist and Lillian’s ex-husband. Her busy screen presence lends this film a lightness so integral to showing Lillian’s journey from tightly wound to loose—and not just through their near-rebirth. The audience can’t help but be moved by his slow sense of humor and deep uneasiness about the world around him, dining at the same bistro every week after work, but still being thoughtful enough to investigate this alleged mystery with Lillian (including going upstairs to a bookstore to steal Amazon packages addressed to a dead woman). It is, in every sense of the word, beautiful.
,
Even though I’d previously been married to Gabrielle and shared a son with him (and a few misguided and hilarious kisses), there’s something strangely odd about my interpretation of Lillian. When we see her visiting a past regressive hypnotist, we get a chance to travel into her subconscious: in the palace of her mind, shadowed behind red and orange eyelids, Lillian wears a white dress and wanders through the vast, almost fleshy labyrinth of her memory, as if she were wandering around like a child. It quickly opens and closes the memory door of her mother’s death (a snowy day, an armful of presents, two children and a car hurtling towards them) and ends in the past, with Foster in all her lesbian glory, tuxedo and cello behind. Taking the place of the man who was in his past life caresses the woman who was Paula in her past life on the cheek and hears her say that she has “his” baby. His face, of desperate joy and adoration, indicates that they cannot be purely platonic. Awakening from her hypnosis session, Lillian asks the hypnotist to return to this state so she can spend more time with Paula, and from there begins her journey to prove that Paula’s death may have been murder.
,
Lillian is moved by many things: the love imprint of a long-dead version of Paula’s soul, the instinct that her death could be at the hands of evil, her and Gabrielle’s promise to keep it platonic, and the words of Gabrielle, Valerie, and Paula’s late husband talking about how unlovingly they spoke of Paula. The idea that someone so bound by logic and reasoning could spend her days acting on her guts only strengthens my suspicion that if Lillian had been more honest with herself earlier, she might have discovered deeply strange aspects of her personality. This is probably the reason why its walls were built so high: so that nothing could enter.
,
When we left the theater after the screening, the attendant informed us that the French Embassy had sent us wine. In the back room of the theater, I picked up a stemmed glass of red and offered a silent toast to Lillian—not quite a believer, not quite a skeptic, who, while never coming to any direct conclusions about the truth about herself or Paula, still chose to live her life more openly. Let us all learn to exist, if not in the immediate sense of ourselves, then at least truthfully and openly, so that life may be given to us all.
,
The writer has to give special thanks to Business Iceland for facilitating this coverage.
