A Couch in New York (1996)

 

Director: Chantal Akerman

Screenplay: Chantal Akerman and Jean-Louis Benoît

Cast: Juliette Binoche as Beatrice Saulnier; William Hurt as Henry Harriston; Stephanie Buttle as Anne; Barbara Garrick as Lizbeth Honeywell; Paul Guilfoyle as Dennis; Richard Jenkins as Campton; Kent Broadhurst as Tim; Matthew Burton as Wood; Henry Bean as Stein; Bernard Breuse as Jerôme

Canon Fodder

I heard that elevators are rare in France.

Never, when I wanted to explore the work of the director of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), did I envision a Chantal Akerman film which begins with a skyline of New York City with a jovial French language song playing over the images. Yet this indeed exists, one of the Belgian director's only attempts at a mainstream production, and it was not held as a well regarded film back when it was made, one of those oddities (or "Perfect Failures"¹) returned to with interest.

I suspect, truthfully, this is not as absurd as you would think to exist in her filmography. I will reference the moment where I suspected the motive of the film, its heart, to be used as the final word of this review, but I also belief that for any director of a certain European or even high acclaim if they get co-European financing, they get nudged out of their comfort zones into productions like this more often than you think. Rightly, many take the chance, as a director like anyone, be it production designer to actor, may like to take a risk and bring their styles to different genres. Also there is a sense that this, Akerman tackling a romantic comedy, has a distinct tone entirely hers as a co-writer as well as director.

Envisioning a plot you could find in a regular romantic comedy - an apartment swap where in NYC a psychiatrist Henry Harriston (William Hunt) wishes to swap with a young woman in Paris called Beatrice (Juliette Binoche) - there is alongside a slower pace also a slowly developing sense of subversion as it goes along. Everything here is as expected for a romantic comedy or at least its archetypes. Henry is a straight laced figure restricted in his immaculate world, hounded by his patients continually to the point it pushed him to this apartment swapping plan. Beatrice is the idealised woman, so innately likable she is also hounded by male suitors regardless of her say by the answering machine or otherwise, a bright spark that, getting Henry's apartment, wins even over the pet Labrador Edgard, a sun to lighten the day of anyone. Utterly alien to Jeanne Dielman's envisioning of the nightmare of being a housewife as a woman, nonetheless I half suspect that Akerman, who wrote the script, has a moment of lightness with insight nonetheless.

This happens to directors (unless, say, Michael Haneke even if he did make a dark comedy once). Jean-Luc Godard made a tribute to musicals in his early career, and even Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the most avant-garde of filmmakers, made En rachâchant (1982), a comedy short which is about a boy wanting to say "shit" at a teacher. Light-hearted material itself can be a venture to explore new ideas, and Akerman here was also deliberately stirring the clichés. Even the very unethical premise, which you would get in a Hollywood film, where his patients still visit and Beatrice decides to act as a therapist herself, Henry locked out of his old life when he decides to move back home earlier than planned, feels heightened in how the plot is used. A question of how, in the ending, a dog can get on an airplane, as it inexplicably travels countries, seems in hindsight either Akerman not caring, forgetting, or less like a plot hole but very likely, from a very considered director, on purpose as whimsy.

The film feels this curious mix. New York City is filmed, with Coca Cola signs and a cinema marquee with Friday (1995) starring rapper/actor Ice Cube is in the background of an Akerman film, but so does a long shot following Henre wandering through Brooklyn, a Manhattan based character of his alien to a slice of community with African Americans going about their lives in the background, all in a moment of realism behind a genre plot in the foreground, as he goes to a payphone and signs up to therapy with Beatrice as "Mr. Wire". Akerman made a film American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), so this was neither the first time she explored the United States either nor New York City, where that film was also set. I would not be surprised if this was an extension from that, only with A Couch in New York being thus by tackling the American forms of a genre as much as a European version. We see less of Paris in comparison, with Beatrice's exaggerated apartment less stylish but impossibly big and cosy for her to have afforded; but even on that side, we get some of the camera eye showing the real world beyond the story.

When Henry becomes Mr. Wire, his own patient, and the film slows down further you can see what Akerman had planned. Taking a clear and obvious genre narrative but fleshing it out with her own touches. Moments of introspection from Henry and Beatrice, Hunt and Binoche great in their roles, stand out as alien to the stereotype of romantic comedy, whether real or a sexist image created of them to scare viewers like me away, of very flat and banal work. Knowing Akerman would make her last film, before her sad passing by suicide in 2015, a documentary involving her mother, No Home Movie (2015), makes a large amount of the dialogue here about Henry thinking about his mother more profound, alienated from her due to accidentally creating an elitist barrier the more successful and financially well off he became as a psychiatrist, more striking as he pictures a dinner where, even in a beautiful dress, he still fixates on her worn hard working hands.

The stereotype, he the man alienated by joy through his success, offers actually a nice mirror to Jeanne Dielman, the middle class housewife trapped in a world of her own, both living in septic lives rather, here not becoming the cheap plot point coded to put viewers off wishing to aspire to success but still dangling middle to upper class life as a tantalising fantasy. This does note glamorise his world, evenif New York City looks idyllic in Akerman's camera and that Henry does look good in suits. Binoche's Beatrice is a factor to consider too; in another film, she would have been a prototypical "Magic Pixie Dream Girl", the idealised woman for a male creator with no real consciousness barring being a bolt of eccentric sunshine to inspire a man; Beatrice here, helped by Binoche herself, is so radiant by herself even the plants in Henry's apartment become a multiple coloured rainforest, and Edgard the dog starts following her around because she makes his home less stressful. She is still arguably an idealised image, but it feels more natural just from having a female director-writer create the character. I only take umbrage with Beatrice as a character for starting to call the dog Romero as a result; Edgard is a better name for him.

Comedy is also still here if drier, helped too by the unexpected surprise of Paul Guilfoyle as Henry's friend, who I recognise from growing up with the original CSI: Crime Scenes Investigations series where he was a regular cast member. Soon into being kicked out of his life, Henry as Mr. Wire finds joy but also meaning to his psychoanalysis of himself which grows the film; the humour when it appears is playful, when between the emotional introspection, like at a diner where a conversation between he and Guilfoyle's charfacter accidentally wraps around a random male bystander in-between them at his table just trying to order food. The Labrador Edgard is also the MVP of the film, the cute dog under an European filmmaker like Akerman never becoming annoying cute or embarrassed as is unfortunate for our canine friends onscreen, the cliché found in a very well trained acting dog and done well, even having the clichéd scene of someone running to an airport to stop someone for him rather than a human cast member.

It is not a perfect film. It is very much an outlier, a UFO in terms of its existence, buried in time in the filmography of a director whose work is not even that easily accessible. I think the film's meaning however is found in one scene - Beatrice and a friend of hers living in NYC, who encourages her in the fake therapy act, are seen at the start of a scene leaving a cinema into the street. They discuss two different reactions to a film, not good or bad, but whether Beatrice is right to love its happy ending where two people fall in love or that the actors looked like two cows in a field. A Couch in New York, clearly made as a fun film, is also from a felt as a result of scenes like this as a pastiche but one made inside this genre's rules. No digressions, sincerely told and using her tale to both charm whilst playing with the form, allowing Akerman to play and think about these tropes like this, giving them weight as a result.

 

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1) A really good phrase, brought about in 2020 as, hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, the temporary closure of the physical spaces of Fondazione Prada, an Italian institution for arts and culture, decided to collaborate with the streaming service of MUBI to create a celebration of the apparent misfires in auteurs' careers. Dated for between 5 April and 30 Jun 2020, obvious choices included Showgirls (1995), less obvious ones like Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978) or (coverer HERE) Charlie Chaplin's last film A Countess from Hong Kong (1967). "Perfect Failures" is literally perfect for these fascinating films from auteurs that miss the targets for popular opinion but we love so.