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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Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. Her writing can also be found at Letterboxd Journal, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Into, Refinery29, and them. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Instagram.

Drew has written 749 articles for us.

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.

Toward the end of Erupcja, Charli xcx recites poetry while looking into the camera. She’s sitting on the floor next to a stack of books, the shadow of a tear imprinted on her face. One of the books piled beside her is Miranda July’s All Fours, a spine recognizable to anyone who has, this past year, frequented the homes of queer women or vaguely queer women or straight women who enjoy fantasizing about the life they imagine exists within queerness.

Like the protagonist of July’s book, Charli xcx plays a character torn between convention and perceived freedom. Both women feel trapped in their heterosexual relationships with nice men, and both women use dishonesty as a tool of avoidance. Both women follow their impulses instead of sitting in the challenge of deliberate want.

When Bethany (Charli xcx) agrees to travel to Warsaw with live-in boyfriend Rob (Will Madden), the destruction is inevitable. She knows Rob plans to propose, and she knows Nel (Lena Góra), her friend/ex/person she’s most romanticized, lives in the city. Instead of telling Rob she doesn’t want to get married, she’s concocted a situation where she can run into her ex and blame whatever happens next on fate. Bethany and Nel are all about fate, interpreting the volcanos that erupt worldwide whenever they’re together as a metaphor for their passion.

Throughout the film, Bethany and Nel will be confronted with the limits of this perspective. An American artist named Claude (Jeremy O. Harris, providing the film some much needed humor) points out that volcanoes kill people. Rob will point out that volcanoes erupt weekly. Whatever unique connection Bethany and Nel imagine they share that allows them to blow up their lives and hurt their loved ones might not be as beautiful or special as they’ve pretended it to be.

There’s something interesting about this idea, about questioning the way chaos can be confused for romance. The problem with Erupcja is it’s trapped in a conventionality of its own. The bond between Bethany and Nel never actually feels that chaotic. Not only does their encounter remain unconsummated, but it feels totally devoid of eroticism. There’s no feeling of temptation. Bethany doesn’t seem to have sexual desire for Rob or Nel — her main attraction is to staying up late and not keeping dinner reservations. She wants the freedom represented by queerness more than queerness itself.

Nel is also in an on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska). When Bethany gets to town, Nel ditches her as quickly as Bethany ditched Rob. The film makes it clear there’s a way for queerness to also be conventional. Lesbians can choose the nice, simple partner instead of the eruption as well. But what the film doesn’t make room for is a more controlled chaos. The options are not explosion or boredom. It’s possible to be honest with your partner about your desires and to find someone who shares your definition of consistency without being stifling. For all the talk of volcanoes and chaos, Bethany and Nel are kind of boring. The protagonist of All Fours is kind of boring. The problems they face are predictable and common, and there ends up being a tediousness to the whole affair.

Director Pete Ohs matches the characters with his style. Colorful monochrome scene breaks, a handheld camera, and a third-person narrator lend the film a feeling of experimentation. But six-plus decades since its French New Wave inspirations, these forms of “experimentation” are now as predictable as a girl wanting to leave her straight boyfriend for a woman.

Erupcja is short and inoffensive, and it might connect with people who share its characters’ conventions. But anyone who has seen Charli xcx on-stage knows her charisma could be used for so much more. She has a casual edge and unique eroticism that make this turn toward acting feel inevitable. There are glimpses here that suggest her presence will translate to the screen but they are fleeting. This is the kind of film that’s more concerned with giving a boring boyfriend his proper due than announcing the arrival of a movie star.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!