A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, 1996) is most well-known, it seems, for being not very well received. Upon its release in its titular city, Janet Maslin described it as “pleasant but unaccountable fluff”.1 Only a few years later, critic Jeff Dick described it as a “rather dispensable direct-to-video romantic comedy”.2 In a Film Comment review Nathan Lee, although presumably a fan of Akerman, includes it amongst “the least of her work”.3 In other contemporaneous reviews scanning the local release market it often garnered nary a mention. To its admirers, though, the film deserves a different story. What these reviews deny is that through all its seeming fluff and generically conservative comedy, it remains a true example of Akerman’s wit and her avant-garde sensibility. As demonstrated in her directorial (and acting) debut, the short film Saute Ma Ville (1968), and in the effervescent musical Golden Eighties (1986), she has always had a sense of humour.

It’s certainly documented that this film was made as an attempt to garner commercial appeal – Akerman mentioned that she did a lot more takes than usual for her, as this was requested because of the producers’ financial stake4 – but the film did not achieve its desired success. In the mid-90s, William Hurt’s career had plateaued although he remained popular, and Juliette Binoche was riding a wave of international success that would culminate with an Academy Award-winning performance in The English Patient (Anthony Mingella) later that year. Despite the star power attached, the film was almost shelved, and eventually accepted a small run at Anthology Film Archives in November 1997. Critics liked it enough, but they couldn’t help dismissing it. 

I’m assuming that such critics and audiences did so because it lacked, possibly, a certain “Akerman-ness”, or skewed from her more cerebral, experimental work. Perhaps they wanted something else entirely. To put that aside, what’s missing from an angle like this is just how well the film fits into the slate of American romantic comedies in the mid-90s. The genre was thriving, as films like Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), Only You (Norman Jewison, 1994), While You Were Sleeping (John Turteltaub, 1995), and even the British Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) achieved strong box office success. With an added Belgian flavour and a decided satirical edge when it comes to Lacanian and Oedipal analysis, A Couch in New York serves as a supreme, surprising, example of the form.

In writing this annotation fairly quickly and without many resources – the screening schedule for Opening Night 2025 came together at rather the last minute – I could find little written about its production. But the film itself is enough to indicate that, while this one about a couch may seem to be the most conventional in Hollywood filmmaking terms, Akerman was not constricted. On its surface it is a romantic comedy where a man and a woman, in a manner opposites, are brought together through bizarre circumstances and eventually fall in love. The man is Henry Harriston (Hurt), a surly psychoanalyst who lives and works in the strict orderliness of his Manhattan apartment, and the woman is Béatrice Saulnier (Binoche), a dancer blissful in her cosy, messy Parisian flat. If this sounds like a clichéd set up – the man is uptight and intellectual; the woman is a free spirit – Akerman’s preoccupations are certainly not shallow. After the two switch apartments – Henry is desperate to get away from his overbearing patients and Béatrice is keen for a holiday – themes of domestic alienation, loneliness, and concerns about capitalist brutality arise. In a book chapter reflecting on the influence of Deleuzian thinking in feminist theory, Verena Andermatt Conley describes the film as a kind of 1990s update of Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (The Meetings of Anna, 1978) altered by a shift away from minimalism and towards burlesque.5 If that’s true, it is a mild version, tempered by wry irony and satire.

A Couch in New York marks a break from stringent minimalism that defines much of Akerman’s artistry, but remains formalist in its very measured framing, rhythm, and mise-en-scène. It’s a terrific example of rich yet efficient filmmaking, where the entire premise of the plot, and the characteristics of the two leads, is sorted out in the first few minutes. The first thing we hear in its first scene following the credits and opening music track is one of Henry’s patients leaving him a voicemail via cell phone, from outside his apartment (which doubles as his consulting room). The camera makes a vertical shift and begins loitering outside Henry’s window – he’s agitated, screening the call – when another patient phones to spill his thoughts in the answering machine. Cut to Béatrice in her apartment, hounded by a lover knocking at her door as another (or is it the same one?) is begging for attention on her answering machine. She ignores everything except a newspaper advertising a New York apartment swap, and immediately, she’s in a taxi to Manhattan. It’s worth noticing the way the two are framed in these scenes. Henry, wearing his crisp suit, is observed from a distance, but Béatrice is immediately in close up, her cheeks flushed from exercise and her warmth immediately apparent. The frequent use of long takes and beautiful visual design, the attention to sonic detail, and the genuinely funny performances she draws from her actors, make this as worthy an artistic output as any of Akerman’s other films. 

As an entry into the long history of the romantic comedy genre, the film’s two most lovely attributes are the tropes of mistaken identity and the thematic importance of language. These manifest in several ways, between each other and amongst other people – as when desperate clients don’t notice she’s not Henry, and Béatrice’s suitors leave voicemails on her machine that Henry openly listens to. As such this film references a whole slew of Hollywood comedies including Bachelor Mother (Garson Kanin, 1939), The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch 1940), The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943), and countless others. In these comedies, understanding and then love comes to people in spite of language; it is observations, interactions and behaviours that bring couples together. Although Henry is a psychoanalyst and his patients spill their guts to him, it is clear that they, along with many other peripheral characters, cannot say what they mean. Such pure expression is saved for the lead couple. The final scene which concludes the romance is accompanied by an instrumental version of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”, first heard in the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire musical The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934) – surely one of the films this is riffing on. 

Living in New York City in the 1970s, Akerman explored the avant-garde film scene and her outputs, like News From Home (1977), reflect this. Returning to New York as a location several times later in her career, her angle was quite different. Akerman herself describes A Couch in New York “as an encounter between Hollywood comedy and Jewish humour”6 and I’d like to think it in the same basket as Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1987), another underappreciated New York romantic comedy. Love occurs despite barriers of difference because intimacy is achieved through talking. Thus, although this is a deconstruction of the romantic comedy, it doubles as a sincere, and smart, version of one. 

Un divan à New York/A Couch in New York (1996 France/Belgium 108 mins)

Prod Co: Paradise Films Dir: Chantal Akerman Scr: Chantal Akerman, Jean-Louis Benoît Ed: Claire Atherton Phot: Dietrich Lohmann Mus: Sonia Wieder-Atherton Art Dir: Bettina von den Steinem 

Cast: Juliette Binoche, William Hurt, Stéphanie Buttle, Paul Guilfoyle, Richard Jenkins.

Endnotes

  1. Janet Maslin, “Sweet and Sour, A Romantic Blend,” The New York Times (online), 19 November 1997.
  2. Jeff Dick, “A Couch in New York,” Library Journal, vol. 123, no. 10, (June 1998): p. 178.
  3. Nathan Lee, “Pleasures of the Text,” Film Comment, vol. 41, no. 5, (Sep/Oct 2005): p. 17.
  4. Claire Atherton, “Tribute to Chantal Akerman,” (trans. Felicity Chaplin), Senses of Cinema, issue 77 (December 2015).
  5. Verena Andermatt Conley, “Becoming-Woman Now” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds. (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 32.
  6. Laura Mulvey, “Chantal Akerman,” Sight & Sound, vol. 23, no. 3 (March 2016): p. 23.

About The Author

Eloise Ross is a co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque. She has a PhD in cinema studies from La Trobe University specialising in Hollywood sound studies, and writes and teaches about film.

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