Two weeks ago, I decided to brave London’s heatwave and go sit in a cool Barbican cinema on a Sunday afternoon to watch a horror movie, Backrooms. The cinema was mostly empty – deliciously so – until four people arrived and sat next to me just as the lights dimmed.
Oh no, here we go, I thought when the young lady closest to me lit up the row with her mobile phone. Luckily, though, the horror was so immersive and well done that she was soon as engrossed as me, and we even got to share a few jump scares.
It got me thinking afterwards if I should watch a horror movie every weekend. Find out which ones are playing in London, but not read anything about them: simply go – preferably walk there – on Sunday afternoons as a treat for having done solid work on my own horror novel.
For this Sunday 12 July, I had the options of Evil Dead Burn or Obsession, but when I checked timings at the Barbican, I spotted a new French film, Vie Privée, starring Jodie Foster, in her first leading French-language role. The film was described as ‘Hitchcockian’ and I was immediately sold. My horror novel’s original pitch, after all, is: “What if Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock met Jaws in East London’s narrowboat community?”
Like the last time, I took a lovely, leisurely stroll and arrived at Barbican Cinema 2 half-hour early. Also like last time, I ordered an iced latte which I could take into the cinema and did a bit of people watching until the cinema was cleared.1
Vie Privée opens with psychotherapist Dr Lilian Steiner (played by Foster) in her Parisian home consulting room (an annex to her apartment) suddenly disturbed by upstairs neighbours blasting the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”. This brought a smile to me as, just the day before, I had a nice phone catch up with Dee, an old friend from uni, who’s in the process of moving to Paris and who originally introduced me to the Heads back in the nineties, when we’d sit in her dorm room chatting, smoking Benson & Hedges, drinking tea and listening to her favourite music.
The story revolves around Jewish characters in Paris – including Steiner and her own family – which again reminded me of Dee, who married a Franco-Italian Jewish writer who’d lived for many years in Paris before meeting her in Brussels 12 years ago.
I must tell Dee about this film!
Dee has been cat sitting in Paris while starting a new job and looking for permanent accommodations. This got us fantasising about me coming to Paris one day to pet sit and perhaps stay for a long time, a month or two. In this fantasy, I’d casually message her to come meet me for coffee and a walk, when not busy with remote work, horror novel writing (of course!) or French immersion classes.
I told Dee of how I wasn’t sure I could visit her in Paris this summer – even after they felt settled – as I was booked up with pet sitting. The one exception is a week in September where I’ll be staying at a house in Montagnac, a village in the South of France, near Montpellier. The house belongs to lovely friends in London who, as a thank you for my regular pet sitting, said I could use any time. And so I said yes to this September. Could Dee come visit me there? She didn’t think it was possible because of her new job, but she’d let me know.
Vie Privée also made me wish to re-start my French studies – a language I originally learnt in the late 90s, a few years after meeting Dee, through intensive courses taken at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. I’m already reading something in French (Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, for one of my bookclubs) and following all sorts of publications and media on TikTok (as all their videos are snappy and subtitled in French) but could I go a bit further and use an app to practice speaking? It’s the one area I’m truly rusty.
I thought of that and more as I walked home and digested the film. It was a perfect homage to Hitchcock (and Woody Allen, a little bit), but very French, with a good dose of drama, humour and suspense. Its ending stayed with me – a beautiful bow tie that wrapped up a lot of earlier set ups through a very poetic final image.
What a wonderful script… and aren’t we lucky to still have Jodie Foster and her impeccable taste in projects!?
I also daydreamed on that walk home of one day being as fluent in French as Foster – breezily enjoying Parisian restaurants on summer evenings, casual social interactions, and then returning to someone’s flat and being affectionate to their cats in French. I felt a bliss within that fantasy as I approached the loft in Shoreditch, Londoners going past me, dazed by their mobile phones, and then sat down once inside, to write all of this in my journal, on someone else’s dining table.
I briefly toyed with the idea of getting snacks from a Tesco Express on the way, but then luckily gave up on the idea – and I say “luckily” because they were carrying bag checks at the cinema room’s entrance.
I love how you jump around in time yet it still reads seamlessly. It's got lovely flaneur vibes that make me feel like I got to hang out with you.
I really enjoyed Backrooms - my son encouraged me to see it, inspired by its Gen Z director’s success. Very thought-provoking. The Jodie Foster movie sounds intriguing.