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A Couch in New York
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At first glance, and particularly to anyone who is
unfamiliar with Akerman’s previous films, A
Couch in New York may seem like a strangely pale, even clunky version of a
typical American romantic comedy from the mid 1990s. It takes to an extreme the
principle of a film such as Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), where lovers who are destined to be together spend most of
the movie apart – or, even when they are together, they somehow miss each
other, or don’t really relate to each other openly, honestly, directly.
A Couch in New York also uses another
staple device of romantic comedy: the comparison and the clash of different
cultures and their manners, like Lawrence Kasdan’s French Kiss (1995 – the two films share a delightful scat song, Paolo Conte’s “Via con me”).
The narrative set-up of Akerman’s film is simple and intriguing: a Parisian dancer,
Béatrice (Juliette Binoche), and a New York psychoanalyst, Henry (William Hurt)
exchange apartments. She lives in the bustling, noisy, colourful, run-down,
very multicultural district of Belleville (where Akerman herself dwelt for
decades); he lives in a vast, sterile, hi-tech New York apartment. She has a
veritable army of lovers after her; he leads a sheltered, loveless, even
solipsistic existence.
For a long time, the film just switches these
characters, and watches them exploring their new environments. But then the
plot lurches forward and keeps zigzagging in sometimes surreal and airy ways.
First, Béatrice starts treating, as an analyst, Henry’s extremely neurotic
patients. Then Henry himself lands back home, and eventually lands on his own
analyst’s couch, where he instantly adopts a fake identity as he converses with
Béatrice.
Akerman has travelled the path from primitive
beginnings to high sophistication in her filmmaking style over and over again,
from film to film, and sometimes within a single film. Watching many of her
movies is like experiencing the birth of cinema: we really see and feel what it
is to use a sound effect, go for a reverse shot, or splash a colour on a wall.
In her films, every stylistic element, as well as every performance element, is
isolated, noted; then it is carefully combined in some fugue-like pattern with
other elements. Her style is typically called minimalist, but that description
is a little dry, because it can miss the special, minute kinds of narrative and
pictorial tension in her images; and, above all, the crisp, tangy, priceless
sensuality of her style. Bodily sensations, the rhythms and expansions and
contractions of time, energies of all sorts, human or non-human – these are all
so palpable in her cinema.
A Couch in New York is a weird sort of
love story, a love story filtered through Jacques Lacan’s principles of modern
psychoanalysis (although Akerman herself was no fan of official, clinical
methods of psychoanalysis). It is basically a very alienated story, full of
emotional traps and abysses, awkward silences and tearing miscommunications. It’s
a genuine comedy of mistaken identity, misrecognition, absences, gaps and
non-reciprocal exchanges between people – particularly between men and women.
One of the characters throws in that bit of pop wisdom, that love is “giving
something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it” – a classic Lacanian
formulation. Whether Akerman is filming the gestures and perceptions of her
characters in a strange city or whether she is tracing the movements of that
strange dance called falling in love, she is alive to something that is alien
and disconcerting: the sensations that take people out of themselves, shake
them up, disturb or even annul them.
The relationships that happen between Akerman’s
favoured, unformed individuals are strange, floating, inscrutable events –
inscrutable even to those who are inside those relationships. Love, in an
Akerman film, is always, almost literally, a falling-in-love, a sudden trip or
descent or collision, where the spark of desire, of erotic or romantic
connection, is absurdly immediate. Toute
une nuit (1982), one of Akerman’s most soulful and haunting films, shows a
series of experiences and encounters that occur to a wide range of people
between nightfall and daybreak in Brussels. In one unforgettable vignette, two
people in a bar happen to get up from their respective tables at the same
moment. As their paths cross, these two strangers suddenly fall into each
other’s arms in a wild embrace; and they dance to the sad tune that’s playing
on the jukebox like they’ve been wrapped up in each other forever.
It is little wonder that Akerman made, shortly after,
a film that recorded various dances by Pina Bausch’s troupe (Un jour, Pina m’a demandé, 1984) –
documenting hair-raising tableaux of attraction and repulsion that have a
similar elemental, fiery, irrational emotional logic. A Couch in New York, too, is about a love that has virtually no
reason to it, that scarcely needs any pretext to be born – that might just as
well, if conditions were different, never have been born.
When Akerman’s marvellous triangular romance Nuit et jour (1991) was shown at the
Venice Film Festival, a prominent juror complained publicly that her way of
telling a love story seemed to deliberately leave out exactly the scenes you
would normally expect in such a story: the turning points, the moments of
decision, recognition, revelation. And even some of Akerman’s fans sometimes think
she is better as a static portraitist (fit for the ‘new media’ art gallery)
rather than someone who can relay a developing story of evolving characters and
emotions across time. Personally, I think that criticism is nonsense.
Akerman has her own, special, individual way with plots
and characters; it moves and feels different to the norm. Dominique Païni (in a
stirring defence of A Couch in New York in Trafic, no. 19, Summer 1996) speaks
of the “perfect union” in Akerman’s art between, on the one hand, “a voyage or
story” and, on the other hand, a “highly plastic, architectural conception of mise en scène”. Put another way, there
are characters sketched in Akerman’s films; and then there are spaces, lived spaces, rendered or
described (and not just visually: they are richly sonic spaces, too). The special rhythm, the sometimes halting,
hulking weight of her films, comes from this insistence on both aspects, and on
their constant superimposition: characters, plus the spaces they live in – and
sometimes these spaces are more real, more alive, more like characters than the
characters themselves.
It can seem that Akerman’s physical, material universe
comes in only two forms: closed spaces that lock characters in; and open spaces
that allow them to move, traverse or fly. This is, in bald terms, the
difference between oppressive domestic spaces, like the apartment that imprisons
the main character of her masterpiece, Jeanne
Dielman (1975); and free spaces such as the street. But the difference
between open and closed doesn’t always correspond simply to interior spaces versus
exterior ones; sometimes, it is the vast public spaces (like a railway station)
that weigh down and oppress; and sometimes, private, domestic spaces are like
infinitely expansive wonderlands to the women played by Akerman herself who
burrow indoors and do the most amazing things with their room furnishings (Je tu il elle [1974] & Man with a Suitcase [1983]). In any
case, these two forms of closed and open space come complete with a matching
camera strategy appropriate to their allotted sensation.
She uses tense static frames for closed spaces, which
she composes like a true painter. And she uses her signature shot, the lateral
track, to follow a character singing, dancing or, usually, just walking through
open spaces. (Akerman is the cinema’s greatest poet of the stroll, the amble – with
all the wonder and menace that a stroller can encounter.) As usual, A Couch in New York works these diverse
kinds of spaces and spatial sensations, and shows the give-and-take circuit of
echoes, correspondences and changes that pass between them.
A Couch in New York is lighter and more
comic than previous Akerman films – although a type of avant-garde ‘slapstick
of another kind’ has been present from the very first, teenage short, Saute ma ville in 1968. Couch evokes memories of Jacques Tati
and, especially, Ernst Lubitsch. He, too, made films (like The Shop Around the Corner, 1940) in which everything is based on minute comparisons and
echoes: we are constantly led to observe the hilarious, starkly different ways
that his characters walk, talk, dress and sing. And here is another fine
Lubitsch principle which Akerman has today made her own: if any character can
be transformed into their complete opposite number with the help of a makeover
and a few gags, then everyone is, in a sense, free, blessed, always able to
start over as someone new.
The big difference between the great Lubitsch movies
and this brave comedy by Akerman is that A
Couch in New York, finally, is rather charmless, even a bit forced. Binoche
is very fresh and appealing in her role, but Hurt is a sunken, dark-eyed,
morbid Nosferatu – and, one must admit, there is absolutely no chemistry
between them. (Akerman had a hard time, in different ways, directing both of
them.) But that is Akerman’s gamble here, on many levels: to make a breezy,
bright, liberating romantic comedy without the usual charm, without the typical
chemistry; without those conventional crutches, or easy ways of securing
audience empathy.
The experiment does not entirely work, but the
results are always fascinating.
MORE Akerman: The Captive, Golden Eighties, Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Tomorrow We Move © Adrian Martin December 1997 |
