Un divan à New York (A Couch in New York). 1998. Belgium/France/Germany. Directed by Chantal Akerman. Screenplay by Akerman, Jean-Louis Benoît. With Juliette Binoche, William Hurt, Barbara Garrick, Paul Guilfoyle, Richard Jenkins. DCP courtesy The Bureau Sales. In English and French; English subtitles. 108 min.
Swapping homes means swapping lives. In this Lubitschian romantic comedy of mistaken identities, misunderstandings, inverted roles, and motherly love, the free-spirited, straight-talking Béatrice (Juliette Binoche) trades her messy Parisian apartment with Henry (William Hurt), a buttoned-up New York shrink with a pristinely curated Fifth Avenue penthouse, a golden retriever, and a fiancée. Henry discovers on his return to New York that Béatrice is conducting therapy sessions with his neurotic patients. Intrigued, he pretends to be one of them and soon finds himself on the proverbial couch. As the transference and countertransference inevitably take hold, so too does their love. Chantal Akerman’s sendup of psychoanalysis imagines the talking cure as an act of seduction. “One night,” she would recall, “I was writing A Couch in New York to please my father—thinking that it would bring in money and that money would finally satisfy him. My uncle (by marriage) told me how devoted my father was to his mother (whom I’d only known after she became crazy), more than to their father. That gave me some space to breathe, let me feel somewhat relieved. But it meant I had to save myself. If I didn’t, as a daughter who’s always withdrawn, what would I become? In a clinic my whole life, like one of my aunts.”