The Cinematheque

“Hysterical … A joyous film, and perhaps for that reason alone, more than any other, an outlier in Akerman’s filmography.”

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, Screen Slate

Chantal Akerman’s work in comic traditions—Chaplinesque performance in The Man with a Suitcase, or Yiddish theatre in Histoires d’Amerique—reached its most distilled and popular expression in A Couch in New York. A perfectly symmetrical premise apartment-swaps ballet dancer Béatrice (Juliette Binoche) and psychoanalyst Henry (William Hurt) between Paris and New York. Each learns about the opposite’s personality purely through the space each has left behind. While its use of stars and genre might position the film as a career outlier, this is unmistakably Akerman. The film’s sense of how reality bends according to living spaces and verbal suggestibility—core concepts whether we’re talking Lubitsch or Shakespearean comedy—is perhaps even more animated than it is in Golden Eighties. Yet its poignant and daring tonal mix of dialogue and slapstick remains rooted in Akerman’s constant interests: in mothers, dislocation, and depression, and the way love is transformed over distances.

In English and French with English subtitles

“A true example of Akerman’s wit and her avant-garde sensibility … Although this is a deconstruction of the romantic comedy, it doubles as a sincere, and smart, version of one.”

Eloise Ross, Senses of Cinema