Uncategorized
In a stylish mystery, Jodie Foster releases the dybbuk of French Jewish identity
Dr. Lilian Steiner isn’t really listening.
Yes, she hears the thunderous strains of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” playing from an upstairs neighbor’s apartment above her psychiatry practice in a tony arrondissement of Paris. She is committed to recording the sessions on mini-discs for future reference, even if she has to bug her digital native son to buy replacements on Amazon. But when a patient dies from an apparent suicide, without any of the usual warning signs, she knows she’s missing something.
French director Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a semi-dark comic mystery takes Lilian out of her routine. The film has the therapist, played by a captivating Jodie Foster, principalement en français, working to solve the case of her patient, a middle-aged German language teacher named Paula. When Paula’s daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami), approaches Lilian with what she believes is a message, Lilian listens back to their sessions and begins to suspect foul play — i.e., murder. Soon she’s sleuthing around, and hooking up with her ex-husband Gaby (Daniel Auteuil).
Things take a turn for the sinister when Lilian shows up to pay her respects — later to be thrown out by Paula’s irate widower, Simon (Mathieu Amalric). Shortly after arriving, Lilian removes a sheet from a mirror, and a woman warns her that in doing so she will “awaken the dybbuk.”
The moment of cultural unawareness is telling if not entirely plausible. While Lilian is Jewish, and establishes her knowledge of the custom of burying a body quickly, she’s firmly secular. We see her slurping back an oyster and learn she didn’t circumcise her now-adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste). For whatever reason, she didn’t get the mirror memo. What she does detect, perhaps more acutely than most as an American expat, is antisemitism.
A hypnotist Lilian consults to fix her newly compulsive crying informs her that Freud stopped practicing hypnotism when he realized it was less “interesting” financially than the longer process of psychoanalysis. Lilian wastes no time dubbing this remark “borderline antisemitic.”
But their session produces a real breakthrough, linked to an infamous episode in the Holocaust. In a surreal sequence, Lilian sees herself in the body of a male cellist in 1942 Paris, witnessing a raid of a concert hall by the police in what can be assumed to be the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, the mass arrest and deportation of Paris’ Jews.
In the trance, Lilian sees Nazis in the house seats, a woman who looks exactly like Paula is playing next to her whispering something indistinct, Simon conducts, and her son Julien’s face is on the body of a militiaman — not a Nazi, she insists, but a French collaborator. Indeed, they were the ones who carried out the arrests. When Lilian returns to her tape of her hypnosis to reenter the scene, she finds more clues, including a postcard that takes her out of Paris for a stakeout. (Zlotowski co-wrote the film with author Anne Berest, whose autofictional book The Postcard uncovers her family’s story in the Holocaust.)
When Lilian brings this hypnotic vision up at Julien’s birthday dinner — noting his interest in German at school — he scoffs at the story and calls her paranoid. Gaby is shocked that Lilian, a woman of science, would suddenly buy into woo-woo notions of past lives. She really, truly, seems to believe her vision holds the key to Paula’s death, while her French-born family takes it all in stride.
Why, then, is history erupting in this modern story, a kind of continental arthouse spin on Netflix’s Murder Mystery franchise?
As motives are clarified and red herrings reveal themselves, the Pétain years Lilian glimpsed show themselves as very much alive in the present. A disgruntled patient draws a swastika by her office: “A very small one,” he says in his defense, “by the doorbell.”
Zlotowski took on the period just before Nazi occupation in her 2016 film Planetarium, a sort of roman à clef about persecuted Jewish French film producer Bernard Natan. In Private Life, as in her films Dear Prudence and Other People’s Children, Zlotowski masterfully sketches a French Jewish family and all its messy intersections in a society that privileges the principle of laïcité, the state religion of secularism. (I can’t account for her choice to have Paula’s family say kaddish over her dead body at their home before the funeral, but the rest feels right and an autopsy did delay burial.)
Long on style, with scarlet giftboxes and blood on white snow that reminded me of Resnais’ Stavisky and mirror shots that recalled Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein, the film has something elemental on its mind that seems inseparable from the Jewish question. It ponders how Jews may continue on in a culture that rejects them with some regularity, even as Lilian says at one point — and this holds mostly true of the cast of characters — “everyone here is Jewish.”
What Lilian picks up on is the “very small” swastika on the national fabric, a country still haunted by the Vichy regime. It’s a dybbuk that has yet to be exorcized, and like all dybbuks its business is unfinished.
The post In a stylish mystery, Jodie Foster releases the dybbuk of French Jewish identity appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump Safe After Being Rushed from White House Correspondents Dinner, Shooter in Custody
U.S. President Donald Trump is escorted out as a shooter opens fire during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026, in this screen capture from video. REUTERS/Bo Erickson
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner by Secret Service agents on Saturday night after a man armed with a shotgun tried to breach security, officials said.
A man armed with a shotgun fired at a Secret Service agent, an FBI official told Reuters. The agent was hit in an area covered by protective gear and not harmed, the official said.
All federal officials, including Trump, were safe. About an hour after Trump was rushed from the event, he posted on Truth Social that a “shooter had been apprehended.”
“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” Trump added.
Shortly afterwards, he posted, “The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition.” He said he would be holding a White House press conference on Saturday night.
Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said the service was investigating a shooting near the main screening area at the entrance to the event.
After the sound of shots, dinner attendees immediately stopped talking and people started screaming “Get down, get down!”
Hundreds of guests dove under the tables as Secret Service officers in combat gear ran into the dining room. Trump and the first lady had bent down behind the dais before being hustled out by Secret Service officers.
Many of the 2,600 attendees took cover while waiters fled to the front of the dining hall.
Uncategorized
Trump Cancels Envoys’ Pakistan Trip, in Blow to Hopes for Iran War Breakthrough
US President Donald Trump speaks on the day he honors reigning Major League Soccer (MLS) champion Inter Miami CF players and team officials with an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 5, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump canceled a trip by two US envoys to Iran war mediator Pakistan on Saturday, dealing a new setback to peace prospects after Iran’s foreign minister departed Islamabad after speaking only to Pakistani officials.
While peace talks failed to materialize Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his troops to “forcefully” attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, his office said, further testing a three-week ceasefire.
Trump told reporters in Florida that he decided to call off the planned visit by US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner because the talks in Islamabad involved too much travel and expense, and Iran’s latest peace offer was not good enough for him.
Before boarding Air Force One on Saturday for a return flight to Washington, Trump said Iran had improved an offer to resolve the conflict after he canceled the visit, “but not enough.”
In a social media post, Trump also wrote there was “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership.
“Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!” he posted on Truth Social.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi earlier left the Pakistani capital without any sign of a breakthrough in talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and other senior officials.
Araqchi later described his visit to Pakistan as “very fruitful,” adding in a social media post that he had “shared Iran’s position concerning (a) workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran. Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy”.
Iranian media reported that Araqchi had flown to Oman’s capital Muscat, saying he will meet with senior officials to “discuss and exchange views on bilateral relations and regional developments”.
Sharif wrote in a post on X that he spoke with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian about the regional security situation and told him that Pakistan was committed to serving “as an honest and sincere facilitator — working tirelessly to advance durable peace and lasting stability.”
Tehran has ruled out a new round of direct talks with the United States and an Iranian diplomatic source said his country would not accept Washington’s “maximalist demands.”
IRAN AND US AT AN IMPASSE
Washington and Tehran are at an impasse as Iran has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments, while the US blocks Iran’s oil exports.
The conflict, in which a ceasefire is in force, began with US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran on February 28. Iran has since carried out strikes against Israel, US bases and Gulf states, and the war has pushed up energy prices to multi-year highs, stoking inflation and darkening global growth prospects.
Araqchi “explained our country’s principled positions regarding the latest developments related to the ceasefire and the complete end of the imposed war against Iran,” said a statement on the minister’s official Telegram account.
Asked about Tehran’s reservations over US positions in the talks, an Iranian diplomatic source in Islamabad told Reuters: “Principally, Iranian side will not accept maximalist demands.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said the US had seen some progress from the Iranian side in recent days and hoped more would come over the weekend, while Vice President JD Vance was ready to travel to Pakistan as well.
Vance led a first round of unsuccessful talks with Iran in Islamabad earlier this month.
Uncategorized
Hezbollah Says Ceasefire ‘Meaningless’ as Fighting Continues in South
Israeli military vehicles and soldiers in a village in southern Lebanon as the Israeli army operates in it as seen from the Israeli side of the border, April 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said a US-mediated ceasefire in the war with Israel was meaningless a day after it was extended for three weeks, as Lebanese authorities reported two people killed by an Israeli strike and Hezbollah downed an Israeli drone.
US President Donald Trump announced the three-week extension on Thursday after hosting Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors at the White House. The ceasefire agreement between the governments of Lebanon and Israel had been due to expire on Sunday.
While the ceasefire has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in southern Lebanon, where Israel has kept soldiers in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Responding to the extension, Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayyad said “it is essential to point out that the ceasefire is meaningless in light of Israel’s insistence on hostile acts, including assassinations, shelling, and gunfire” and its demolition of villages and towns in the south.
“Every Israeli attack… gives the resistance the right to a proportionate response,” he added.
Hezbollah is not a party to the ceasefire agreement, and has strongly objected to Lebanon’s face-to-face contacts with Israel.
BUFFER ZONE
The April 16 agreement does not require Israeli troops to withdraw from the belt of southern Lebanon seized during the war. The zone extends 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles) into Lebanon.
Israel says the buffer zone aims to protect northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah, which fired hundreds of rockets at Israel during the war.
Hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, when the group opened fire in support of Iran in the regional war. The ceasefire in Lebanon emerged separately from Washington’s efforts to resolve its conflict with Tehran, though Iran had called for Lebanon to be included in any broader truce.
Nearly 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since March 2, the Lebanese health ministry says.
ISRAELI MILITARY WARNS RESIDENTS TO LEAVE TOWN
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli airstrike killed two people in the southern village of Touline on Friday.
Hezbollah shot down an Israeli drone, the group and the Israeli military said. Hezbollah identified it as a Hermes 450 and said it had downed it with a surface-to-air missile.
An Israeli drone was heard circling above Beirut throughout the day on Friday, Reuters reporters said.
The Israeli military warned residents of the southern town of Deir Aames to leave their homes immediately, saying it planned to act against “Hezbollah activities” there.
Deir Aames is located north of the area occupied by Israeli forces, and it was the first time Israel had issued such a warning since the ceasefire came into force on April 16. Posted on social media, the Israeli warning gave no details of the activities it said Hezbollah was conducting in the town.
The Israeli military also said it had intercepted a drone prior to its crossing into Israeli territory, and that sirens were sounded in line with protocol.
WAR-WEARY RESIDENTS SEEK END TO FIGHTING
The continued fighting has angered war-weary Lebanese, who say they want to see a genuine ceasefire put a full halt to violence.
“What’s this? Is this called a ceasefire? Or is this mocking (people’s) intelligence?” said Naem Saleh, a 73-year-old owner of a newsstand in Beirut.
Residents of northern Israel had mostly returned to daily life, but expressed pessimism about the longevity of the ceasefire with Lebanon.
“I believe that the ceasefire is so fragile, and unfortunately it won’t stand long, in my opinion,” said Eliad Eini, a resident of Nahariya, which lies just 10 km (6 miles) from the border with Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in the south, including a journalist.
Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter, in his opening remarks at Thursday’s talks, said “Lebanon should acknowledge the temporary presence of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and the right of Israel to defend itself from a hostile force that is firing on the population.”
Lebanon’s Ambassador to the United States Nada Moawad, in a written statement sent to Reuters, called for the ceasefire to be fully respected and said it would allow the necessary conditions for meaningful negotiations.
Lebanon has said it aims to secure the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from its territory in broader talks with Israel at a later stage.
Trump said on Thursday that he looked forward to hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the near future, and said there was “a great chance” the two countries would reach a peace agreement this year.
Hezbollah attacks killed two civilians in Israel after March 2, while 15 Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon since then, Israel says.