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Where both
La captive and Nuit et jour have attracted
considerable critical attention, Akerman's "least
successful" film, (3) A couch in New York, has not
been accorded the same degree of
interest.[3],[4]
(4) The alleged failings of the film have typically been
accounted for in terms of the mismatch of Akerman's
"subversive talents" with such a "flatout commercial
endeavour" [5]
For those convinced of the director's status as "one of
the most celebrated minimalists in contemporary movies",
A couch in New York represents a disconcerting
career indiscretion best ignored.[6]
But it is
precisely because of the supposedly anomalous position
the film occupies in Akerman's oeuvre, and the benign
critical neglect with which it has been treated, that the
film warrants closer inspection. If "keeping a
distance" is a strategic element in Akerman's cinema (7)
that has simultaneously ensured the power of her work and
discouraged a mainstream audience, A couch in New York
afforded the director an opportunity to engage with
the sort of popular genre and attendant audience that had
thus far eluded her.[7],[8]
(8) The film is as revealing as any of the more revered
works in the Akerman canon. Rather than a directorial
aberration, A couch in New York incorporates the
director's key stylistic and thematic preoccupations
within the broad parameters of a mainstream romantic
comedy. Akerman has
described A couch in New York as "what Hollywood
would call a double fish out of water
film".[9]
Written by Akerman with Jean-Louis Benoit, this "double
fish out of water" scenario serves a series of
interrelated, structural, ideological and aesthetic
purposes. The film elaborates on Akerman's abiding
interest in notions of romantic love and desire, and the
themes of exile, displacement and expatriation, issues
explored at length in earlier films. A couch in New
York is also a typically shrewd and witty take on the
genre of romantic comedy itself. Akerman's whimsical and
economical deployment of the standard conventions of the
genre allows the director to expand on a comic
sensibility that is an understated but nevertheless
significant element in her work. When A
couch in New York was released in 1996, the
combination of a filmmaker "not noted for her humour" and
the genre of romantic comedy was characterised as a
thoroughly unnatural alliance.[10]
In tackling this genre, Akerman in fact builds on a comic
inclination apparent from the earliest period of her
filmmaking career. Akerman's first short, Saute ma
ville (Belgium 1968), is a grimly comic depiction of
adolescent suicide. The black-and-white film, featuring
Akerman herself, takes a humorous look at the horrors of
domesticity. In one of the few analyses to focus on the
lighter touch in Akerman's work, Jonathan Rosenbaum
linked Saute ma ville with the tradition of Keaton
and Chaplin, observing that "the film refutes any view of
Akerman as a sombre filmmaker".[11] A couch in
New York opens, unsurprisingly, in the city of New
York, where disillusioned psychoanalyst Dr Henry
Harriston (William Hurt) is desperate to escape his
aggressively needy patients. Henry advertises for an
apartment swap in the International herald tribune
and Parisian Beatrice Saulnier (Juliette Binoche)
responds. The two swap homes, sight unseen. Akerman
immediately establishes a series of extreme contrasts
between her two central protagonists. Henry's restrained
personality and obsessive neatness are reflected in the
severe minimalism of his Fifth Avenue apartment - a space
after Akerman's own minimalist heart. His staunchly
classical tastes and formal appearance suggest that
Henry's emotions, along with his household appliances,
are on permanent remote control. He is in many ways, a
worthy American counterpart to Akerman's earlier
incarnation of obsessive behaviour and repressed desire,
Jeanne Dielman (in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles), (Belgium/France
1975). Where Henry is
a rational man of science, Beatrice is a passionate
dancer. She is as messy and impulsive as he is neat and
orderly. Her apartment is a work in progress in the
multi-ethnic district of Belleville. With tradesmen
hammering overhead and discarded clothes underfoot, her
home is an inspirationally cluttered space littered with
the signs of an exuberant life fully lived. Beatrice's
answering machine runs hot with the earnest pleas of
besotted lovers while, in New York, clients leave hostile
phone messages demanding Henry's professional attention.
She describes his home as "peaceful" ; hers is visibly
and audibly chaotic. If A couch
in New York can be understood as part of Akerman's
"stories of lovers in the city" trilogy, the urban
setting is clearly central to an understanding of these
three films. Notions of place and space in A couch in
New York are significant in a number of ways. First,
and most transparently, the cross-cultural romance
between Henry and Beatrice brings together two characters
representing the two continents that have defined the
director's cinematic landscape. In her peripatetic
existence as a filmmaker, Akerman has returned
consistently, if not obsessively, to the landscape of
America. In shorts, documentaries and fiction films,
America features as a source of cinematic inspiration.
Significantly, the America of Akerman's films is a
cultural and historical topography invariably imaged and
imagined in relation to a European
counter-reality. An early
Akerman work, News from home (Belgium/France
1976), definitively inaugurated the notion of an
imaginary America in Akerman's oeuvre.[12]
This hybrid blend of documentary and autobiography
featured Akerman's characteristic combination of static
and tracking shots of New York locations, accompanied by
the filmmaker's dispassionate voice-over, reading her
mother's letters from Belgium. The film's disjunctive
relation of voice and image, the contrast of detached
cityscape imagery with intimate details of Belgian life,
produced an abstracted America of the imagination, rather
than a prescriptive portrait of the city. News from
home closes with a lengthy and elegiac image of the
receding New York skyline. Some twenty years later, A
couch in New York opens with the same night skyline,
albeit overtly stylised. The accompanying lyrics
deliberately and over emphatically paraphrase the
specific appeal of this location in Akerman's
work.[13]
It is a
charmed image which Akerman repeatedly returns to in the
film. The director's acute double vision consistently
contrasts Henry's jaundiced American perspective with
Beatrice's wide-eyed, European gaze. Entranced with
America, the land of "cable, cigarettes and booze",
Beatrice enthusiastically embraces the New York sky, the
streets, the apartment -- even Henry's profoundly
neurotic clients.[14]
Akerman's "attempts to create a magical atmosphere...with
fairytale skies" have been regarded as undermining the
film's appeal.[15]
However,
this "magical atmosphere" is entirely consistent with the
director's perspective, where New York is figured as a
veritable fantasy land -- as seen through the eyes of a
French ingenue. In a number of Akerman films, New York is
figured as a symbolic silhouette, one that functions as a
chimerical rendering, not simply of the city, but of
America itself.[16] If Akerman's
film invokes both Europe and America, it equally
foregrounds the theme of movement between these two
locations. (Even its title, technically, is
double-barreled, appearing in both English and French in
the credits.) A couch in New York is an unusual
contribution to the genre - a romantic comedy underpinned
by a dual discourse of expatriation. The "double
fish out of water" premise thus represents an
appropriately colloquial reformulation of Akerman's
enduring preoccupation with the politics of place, exile
and alienation. The director has spoken repeatedly about
her ambivalent relation to her Jewish heritage. The
daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, she has
identified with the difficulties of the "second
generation" -- the children of Holocaust survivors -- in
coming to terms with a history often misguidedly
repressed. "And because they didn't tell us about that
past, because they didn't pass it down to us, what they
did pass down was precisely this sense of
uprootedness".[17] This sense of
uprootedness and associated themes of isolation and
alienation are insistent textual and subtextual thematics
running through Akerman's work. In News from home,
Akerman's own alienation is registered in her
detached images of New York and their disjunctive
relation to the accompanying voice-over. Rendezvous
d'Anna (France/Belgium/GFR 1978) details the
autobiographically inspired journey of a female filmmaker
across Europe. As the title suggests, the film is
concerned with both movement and stasis, encounters and
departures - above all, with Anna's enduring sense of
dislocation, even, and most profoundly, in the moment of
her arrival home. Histoires d'Amérique: food,
family and philosophy (France/Belgium 1989) - a
series of dramatic monologues interspersed with Jewish
humour - conveys the experiences of Holocaust survivors
against the backdrop of a new life in America. It is a
film fundamentally informed by notions of the journey,
displacement and expatriation. In A couch
in New York, Henry's flight to Europe, a reverse
diasporic liberation of sorts, confers no real freedom
but, rather, compounds his sense of ennui. Where the
European Beatrice becomes a New Yorker with apparent
ease, Henry is both unable to adapt to Parisian life, and
on his return to New York, equally estranged from his own
home town. He is ultimately a "real nowhere man", adrift
in an American "nowhere land". In the improbable context
of a mainstream romantic comedy, Akerman explores the
complexities of expatriation and dislocation so germane
to her oeuvre. Henry's tragi-comic experiences thus
engage with the fundamental notion that identity and
belonging are not necessarily bound to the materiality of
place and space. Henry's liminal status symbolises an
underlying crisis of personal identity that in turn
reflects the "sense of uprootedness" acknowledged by the
filmmaker herself. Akerman
further extends the significance of place and space,
adding another layer of complexity to the film. When
Henry returns to New York in the latter half of the film,
the action is centred almost exclusively in his
apartment. He discovers that, in his absence, the
untrained but sympathetic Beatrice has taken over his
practice. Under her tutelage, Henry's dog, his most
demanding clients and even his indoor plants are
thriving. Intrigued, Henry masquerades as a client, John
Wire. In the emblematic comic scenario of disguised
identity that transpires, Henry learns some
psychoanalytic home truths of his own. He feels strangely
but increasingly at home, in therapy, on the other side
of his own couch in New York. If New York is
symbolically significant in Akerman oeuvre, Henry's
apartment functions as a condensation of the surrounding
cityscape, a space where the most significant character
interactions take place. It has been suggested that in
Nuit et jour the apartment shared by Julie and
Jack stands in for the city that surrounds it. "Paris,
the big city, is reduced to the size of the
room".[18]
The
labyrinthine spaces allow the lovers to shut out the rest
of the world, to both avoid and engage with each other,
to make love, talk, argue, reconcile and make love again.
The city itself is present only as a series of anonymous
streets and locations presented in a deliberately low-key
manner - a fountain, a cafe, the river. A not
dissimilar strategy is at work in A couch in New
York, where Akerman exploits the expressive
possibilities of interior space. As with the tight
framing of characters in windows and doorways in Night
and day, Akerman utilises the severe verticals and
horizontals of the apartment to organise characters,
particularly Henry, as compositional elements. Equally,
the space functions as an exclusion zone, shielding the
occupants by foreclosing on the outside world,
represented by the stylised New York skyline. With its
long central corridor and Zen-like ordering of rooms,
Henry's apartment functions as a way of directing
character interactions, most significantly the
"consultations" between Beatrice and Henry. As with the
circumlocutory exchanges between Julie and Jack in
Nuit et jour, the charade of doctor and patient in
A couch in New York is played out through the
entrances and exits, the movement through space and the
solemn procession to the analyst's
couch. In some
respects, A couch in New York presented Akerman
with her most difficult challenge. It was an opportunity
for this most iconoclastic of contemporary European
auteurs to work within the constraints of the most
paradigmatic of Hollywood genres. In other respects,
romantic comedy was peculiarly suited to Akerman's formal
and thematic preoccupations -- her enduring interest in
exploring the complexities of both romantic love and the
idea of genre itself. From the very
beginning of her career, Akerman's films have evidenced a
well-documented disregard for the conventions of genre
and a wilful blurring of the boundaries of fiction,
documentary and autobiography. In her first two decades
of filmmaking, Akerman's interrogations of genre
coalesced around the comedy and the musical. Key works
included overt variations on slapstick comedy in J'ai
faim, j'ai froid (Belgium 1984), L'Homme à
la valise (France 1983) and more obliquely, the
autobiographically-based farce with slapstick overtones,
Family business: Chantal Akerman speaks about film
(GB 1984). Akerman worked over the musical in similar
fashion, in stylised, deconstructive meditations on the
genre in The eighties (France 1983) and Golden
eighties aka Window shopping
(France/Belgium/Switzerland 1986). From her
earliest works such as Je, tu, il, elle (Belgium
1974) and Les rendezvous d'Anna
(Belgium/France/Germany 1978), Akerman has also
consistently explored the romance narrative or love
story, and concomitant issues around sexuality, identity
and desire. These explorations have been predominantly
registered from the point of view of female protagonists.
Toute une nuit (Belgium/France 1982), Akerman's
most formally rigorous inquiry into the love story,
predates her urban romance trilogy by a decade. Featuring
a huge cast of characters in thirty five different
narratives, the film details a series of apparently
unconnected romantic encounters over the course of one
night in Brussels. Each encounter deals in some way with
the complexities of love, longing, desire and separation.
The film has been described as bravely
tackling While
thematically affiliated with this earlier work, A
couch in New York takes a different strategic
approach to the investigation of romantic love. Akerman
again tackles the "formally and thematically depleted
territory of the love story", but in A couch in New
York she enthusiastically embraces the
"cliché". The specific co-ordinates of that
"cliché" are made clear midway through the film,
where Akerman has her romantic heroine wax lyrical about
a romantic movie she has just seen. Where her friend Anne
decries the "happy ending with smaltzy music and the
lovers looking at each other like two cows in the field",
Beatrice is moved to tears and defends the film as the
"most beautiful thing I've ever seen".[20]
She goes on to directly correlate this experience with
the feelings she has when Henry "opens up to her". In the
course of the film, both Henry and Beatrice make frequent
reference to love as an illness or a disease involving
extreme suffering, affirming the notion of romantic love
in its most hyperbolic and "clichéd"
understanding. In foregrounding these conventional
expressions of romantic love while simultaneously
undercutting the genre of romantic comedy, Akerman is
both critiquing and redeeming the love story as a
cinematic "cliché". Steve Neale
has argued for the emergence of a new cycle of the
Hollywood romantic comedy in the late 1980s and ongoing
into the 1990s -- the "new romance".[21]
It is a cycle which provides a useful context in which to
situate A couch in New York, a film that Akerman
is clearly positioning, in terms of location,
characterisation and thematics, in just such a mainstream
American context. Neale distinguishes the "new romance"
from an earlier counterpart, the "nervous romance",
primarily in terms of the typically conservative ideology
underpinning the former. Where the
"nervous romance" of the late 1970s and mid 1980s
foregrounded the problematic nature of relationships and
commitment, and often featured pathologically nervous or
neurotic protagonists, the "new romance" mitigated the
eccentricities of its protagonists and reaffirmed the
surety of heterosexual romance.[22]
In doing so, the "new romance" constrained its female
protagonists, countering the threat of their independence
and ultimately securing them in traditional
roles.[23]
A couch
in New York, contiguous with the "new romance", is
interestingly positioned in this mainstream romantic
comedy context. Akerman's film both draws on and
deliberately overstates a number of the features of this
cycle, but is also a transitional text, anticipating a
further shift in the genre towards the end of the decade
and beyond. If, as noted
above, the transatlantic locations in A couch in New
York serve a broader formal and thematic purpose in
Akerman's work, they equally provide a framework from
which to develop some of the fundamental elements of the
contemporary romantic comedy. The apartment swap thus
constitutes the "meet cute", the device by which two
strangers are brought together in order to initiate
romance.[24]
The device has varied considerably in the history of the
genre, reflecting the influence of the sexual and
cultural politics of any given period.[25]
Akerman's scenario and its subsequent ramifications
represents an interesting variation on the device,
drawing on both classic and contemporary examples of the
genre but also incorporating the director's specific
preoccupations.[26] The apartment
swap ensures that Henry and Beatrice are separated for a
considerable period of screen time. They learn more about
each other -- in intimate detail and in absentia
-- than if they had actually met.[27]
Akerman's playful and economical cross-cutting between
New York and Paris shows Beatrice and Henry exploring
their new domains. Each contemplates the clothes and
personal preferences the respective apartments reveal.
The contrasts between the two suggest they are an
archetypal example of the seemingly incompatible couple
of classic romantic comedy. But Akerman extends this
simple premise, making these domestic spaces work as a
preliminary arena for seduction. Henry and
Beatrice become increasingly intrigued by the personal
topography of the other. She finds his aftershave
"refreshing, intoxicating" and appropriates his wardrobe.
He is fascinated by the passionate disarray of her
clothes, books and other ephemera and the impassioned
love letters from ardent boyfriends. Even their domestic
pets reveal much about their respective owners -- Henry's
Edgard is an impeccably trained if spiritless Golden
Retriever, while Beatrice's flat is colonised by free
flying doves. In these early establishing scenes, the two
characters' sensory encounters with the objects, surfaces
and space of the other thus become invested with the
erotic charge of a first embrace.[28]
Akerman's
droll exploitation of the "meet cute" thus serves a dual
purpose. It satisfies the structural imperative of
romantic comedy to both promote and prolong an incipient
desire between the protagonists. Equally, it conforms,
however broadly, with Akerman's enduring interest in the
representing the complexities of desire and romantic love
on screen. Akerman's
deliberately overstated approach to romantic comedy is
further sustained in a series of formally and
thematically rigorous ways. Her leading characters are
not merely eccentric individuals, often a feature of the
genre, they are thoroughly outré types. If the
contemporary romantic comedy often posits the eccentric
qualities of protagonists as conferring a "uniqueness and
individuality" on the couple, then Akerman exploits this
convention to its fullest ironic
potential.[29]
Her leading man is thus a "major" New York psychoanalyst
who is himself clearly neurotic.[30]
Even his dog Edgard is maladjusted. Beatrice on the other
hand suggests an almost parodic version of the
contemporary Parisian bohemian, all passion, uninhibited
artistic impulse and fey kookiness. The "accent on
artifice; the vaguely stylised, unrealistic approach to
performance" that attracted the ire of critics, serves to
amplify the already exaggerated quality of Akerman's
characterisations.[31] In
foregrounding the eccentricities of their respective
characters, Akerman also exploits the screen personas of
her two lead actors. Hurt's career has been defined by
roles that emphasise a certain lugubrious on screen
quality His characters are often introspective,
inscrutable or dour and beset by personal crises of a
emotionally painful nature.[32]
In Henry, Akerman has Hurt play a poker-faced conflation
of these on screen characteristics. Binoche, while
notable for a series of dramatic roles predominantly in
the European cinema, has an ethereal and whimsical screen
presence, that in A couch in New York, Akerman
harnesses for more broadly comic purposes. If the
romantic comedy typically employs the device of mistaken
or disguised identity, Akerman top loads her film and
opts for both. She makes plenty of mileage out of early
scenes following the apartment swap. Henry's patients
labour under the amusing misapprehension that Beatrice is
a substitute therapist. It is their ridiculous
self-absorption that quickly co-opts "Dr Saulnier" into
the profession. In subsequent scenes, Beatrice
unwittingly counsels psychoanalyst Henry, who is
masquerading as a patient, thus effecting a further comic
double whammy. The therapy
consultation in turn, becomes the unlikely means by which
the potential lovers are brought together. These scenes
deploy key strategies in the romantic comedy genre,
providing the potential couple with opportunities to both
"play" together and "learn" more about each
other.[33]
Thus: But where the
typical duo of romantic comedy often play at being a
married couple, thereby establishing their shared
interests and ultimate compatibility, in A couch in
New York, Beatrice and Henry act out an amusing
charade of doctor and patient.[35]
In Akerman's sly take on the genre, these passages of
"playing together" involve an absurdly reductive
psychoanalytic discourse which effectively becomes the
language of love. Akerman herself has fun here, taking
sharp aim at some sacred tenets of the therapy
business.[36] The untrained
Beatrice is thus required to navigate the "sometimes
dangerous profession" of psychoanalysis, applying, often
with hilarious effect, a thoroughly vulgarised version of
Freudian theory to her hapless patients.[37]
Oedipal complexes, transference and traumas buried in the
"deepest depths" thereby account for the increasingly
troubling attraction Beatrice feels for Henry, and that
he appears to reciprocate.[38]
Her risible interpretation of non-interventionist
listening strategies -- a sympathetic reiteration of
"yes" and "uh huh" -- becomes the unlikely means of a
slow seduction. If therapy
constitutes "playing together" in Akerman's romantic
comedy, it equally fulfils the function of "the learning
process, a process in which the members of the couple
come to know themselves as they come to know one
another".[39]
This is a central imperative of the genre that ultimately
ensures the couple's compatibility and mutual love. Neale
has argued that the "new romance" has required its female
protagonists to undergo the steepest learning curve,
modifying their eccentricities and compromising more in
order to achieve romantic resolution.[40] It is here
that A couch in New York is at its most
provocative. Akerman has her romantic heroine compromise
very little in the course of the film. An appreciation of
all things American and some rudimentary counselling
skills is the only learning Beatrice is required to do.
It is Henry who is radically re-educated in Akerman's
scenario. He learns to relinquish control, to become
comfortable on the other side of the analyst's couch, to
fall genuinely in love and ultimately, to be "really
frank" and thus more like Beatrice. It is Henry who
finally moves from his couch in New York to Beatrice's
apartment in Paris. If the sexual
politics of the romantic comedy are manifest most
explicitly in this "learning process", through the
relative weight given to masculine and feminine
discourses, Akerman's A couch in New York is an
interesting contribution to the genre[41]
While the
romantic comedy has a theoretical commitment to the
notion of an equal partnership and a mutual learning
process, it has been argued that it is rare to find a
contemporary mainstream romantic comedy in which the male
protagonist knows less and therefore has to learn more
than his female counterpart.[42]
A couch
in New York is one such example. The learning process
in Akerman's film is inscribed principally through the
emotional changes Henry undergoes, and the values and
knowledge he acquires from Beatrice. This is hardly
surprising from a director who has maintained a
consistent interest in the representation of issues of
female desire and identity. But it does represent a
significant ideological difference that further
distinguishes A couch in New York from its
contemporary "new romance" counterparts. Rather
than conforming to the conservative ideological agenda of
the "new romance", Akerman's film anticipates a further
shift in the romantic comedy in the latter half of the
1990s. If, as suggested above, the genre is theoretically
committed to the ideals of an equal partnership and a
mutual learning process, an increasing number of
mainstream romantic comedies of the late 1990s and
beyond, begin to genuinely engage with this
proposition.[43]
A couch in New York represents a transitional
text, one that reasserts the independence of the female
protagonist of the genre and reinstates the ideal of
equal partnership. However broad
the interpretation of romantic love, it is this
emphasis on the uncompromising individuality of the
female protagonist in A couch in New York which
again links the film definitively with Akerman's earlier
work Nuit et jour. The latter film is
fundamentally structured by an investigation of female
desire. A more formally innovative work than A couch
in New York, this lyrical meditation on romantic love
is structured around what initially appears to be a
conventional romantic triangle. In Nuit et jour,
Julie struggles to balance two relationships, staying
awake at night with Joseph and spending her days with
Jack. As with A couch in New York, love is figured
as a form of sickness, a condition from which its three
protagonists variously suffer. The circuitous narrative
allows each character to continuously and repetitively
reflect on their feelings and motivations. An
unconventional romantic heroine in both appearance and
attitude, Julie is forced to choose between Jack and
Joseph but ultimately rejects both in favour of autonomy.
In a lengthy take that concludes the film, Julie strolls
toward the camera, a slight, self-satisfied smile playing
across her face. It is a surprising but entirely logical
denouement from a filmmaker whose motivating interest is
"in the status of the representation of woman -- her
desire, her self-image, the image others create of her
and for her".[44]
Despite
their formal disparities, Nuit et jour and A
couch in New York can be understood as variations on
the theme of female desire within the broad framework of
a traditional love story, ultimately resolved in
the feminine affirmative. The concluding
scenes in A couch in New York provide an
appropriate point at which to close this discussion. When
Henry and Beatrice return separately to Paris, they talk,
sight unseen, from either side of the adjoining balcony.
Henry's true identity has still not been revealed. As the
conversation proceeds and Henry reiterates key phrases
and exchanges they have had as doctor and patient,
Beatrice finally understands that her patient John Wire
is none other than Dr Henry Harriston. Unlike the happy
ending of many conventional romantic comedies, there is
something deliberately anti-climatic about the denouement
in Akerman's film. The revelation of Henry's identity,
Beatrice's surprise and their subsequent embrace feels
decidedly contrived, over and above the standard level of
contrivance demanded in generic terms. Given Akerman's
agenda of embracing the "'cliché" of the love
story, it is unsurprising that the director should choose
to undercut what should be the most powerfully cathartic
and resonant moment in the romance narrative. The
unconvincing quality of the resolution in A couch in
New York thus registers the cumulative effect of
Akerman's persistent tweaking of the genre. Even among
the film's infrequent admirers, there is a sense, as with
the final scenes, that the film as a whole "does not
entirely work". [45]
The
director's abiding interest in issues of romantic love
and desire combines, sometimes uneasily, with her
playful generic interventions. It is this equivocal
quality that accounts, in part, for the film's lack of
critical or commercial acclaim, but it is also what makes
the film such an interesting Akerman work. If Nuit et
jour is "a film in a light mode that is so revealing
of Akerman's major concerns", one could make a similar
claim for A couch in New York.[46]
While the latter lacks the formally innovative strategies
of other Akerman works, the film is equally revealing in
illustrating how the director engages with a prescriptive
generic form. Akerman's tilt at the romantic comedy is
thus both consistent with the formal and thematic
preoccupations that characterise her work and, given its
mainstream generic trappings, an unusual Akerman
proposition. The film incorporates the director's
signature themes -- exile, expatriation, romantic love,
desire, identity -- with a formal interrogation of genre
itself. If scholarship on Akerman's work has consisted
"almost entirely of fleeting glances" this discussion
constitutes yet another, justifiably circumscribed
"fleeting glance".[47]
It is a glance aimed specifically at an unfairly
neglected but nevertheless significant contribution to
the Akerman canon. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
Ginette
Vincendeau, "The captive", Sight and sound, Vol.
11, No.5, (May 2001): 45. [2]
Vincendeau
specifically groups these three films
together. [3]
Amy
Taubin, "A couch in New York", Village voice
(4 February 1997). Australian Film Institute
Clippings file, no page number available. [4]
I
have not yet been able to see La captive, and I am
also restricted to surveying analyses of Akerman's work
in English. [5]
Taubin. [6]
J.Hoberman,
"Have camera will travel", Premiere (July 1994):
38. [7]
Janet
Bergstrom, "Keeping a distance", Sight and sound,
Vol. 9, No.11 (November 1999): 28. [8]
Akerman
has spoken recently of her desire for a wider audience in
relation to her most recent film La captive. See
Nick James, "Magnificent obsession", Sight and
sound, Vol 11, No.5 (May 2001): 21. [9]
Janet
Maslin, "Sweet and sour, a romantic blend", New York
times (20 November 1997) from Australian Film
Institute clippings file, page number
unavailable. [10]
Ibid. [11]Jonathan
Rosenbaum, <http://www.worldartists.com/akermania.htm> [12
]
Janet Bergstrom also uses this term in her
psychoanalytically derived reading of Akerman's oeuvre.
See "Chantal Akerman: splitting", Endless night:
cinema, psychoanalysis, parallel histories, Janet
Bergstrom ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University
of California Press 1999): 273-290. [13]
The song
"Via con me", sung by popular Italian performer Paolo
Conte, includes the lyrics "s'wonderful". [14]
The
heavily European-accented New York cabby's definition of
the pleasures of the American way of life! [15]
David
Rooney, "A couch in New York", Variety (12
February 1996): 81. [16]
Aside from
texts already mentioned, New York is also referenced in
Histoires d'Amérique: food, family and
philosophy and Family business: Chantal Akerman
speaks about film. [17]
Jean-Luc
Outers, "Histories d'Amerique", Cinergie
(February, 1989): 6. [18]
Ivone
Margulies, Nothing happens: Chantal Akerman's
hyperrealist everyday (Durham and London, Duke
University Press 1996): 184. [19]
Ivone
Margulies, 174. [20]
Dialogue
from A couch in New York. [21]
Steve
Neale, "The big romance or something wild?: romantic
comedy today", Screen 33:3 (Autumn, 1992):
284-299. [22]
Frank
Krutnik identified this early cycle of the "nervous
romance", nominating in particular, a series of Woody
Allen films which exemplified the cycle ie Annie Hall
(USA 1977) and Manhattan (USA 1979). See Frank
Krutnik, "The faint aroma of performing seals: the
`nervous romance' and the comedy of the sexes", The
velvet light trap, No. 26 (1990): 57-72. [23]
Neale,
287. Neale's examples of the "new romance" include
Moonstruck (USA 1987), Working girl (USA
1988) and When Harry met Sally (USA
1989). [24]
Mike
Bygrave, "Farewell Rambo, hello Romeo", The
guardian, 6, (June 1991): 30. [25]
Mike
Bygrave, 30. Bygrave notes, in particular, the influence
of feminism. Classic situations such as a boss asking his
secretary out have been rendered less acceptable given
the context of sexual harassment. [26]
The
apartment swap in A couch in New York is a
variation on a location based romantic comedy that can be
linked with earlier films including The Apartment
(USA 1960). [27]
Again,
Akerman's film draws on the both past and present
examples of the genre, Sleepless in Seattle (USA
1993) being an obvious contemporary
forerunner. [28]
This
scenario of indirect seduction is again, not without
precedent in the genre, the most obvious example being
Ernest Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (USA
1940). [29]Steve
Neale, 291. [30]
The
neuroticism of Henry's character aligns him specifically
with the Woody Allen anti-heroes of the earlier cycle of
"nervous romances". [31]
David
Rooney, "A couch in New York", Variety
(February, 1996): 81. [32]
These
characters are typified by his roles in The big chill
(USA 1983), The accidental tourist (USA 1988)
and The doctor (USA 1991). [33]
Steve
Neale, 292. [34]
Ibid. [35]
Ibid. [36]
The
discourse of psychoanalysis itself is of course not new
to the contemporary romantic comedy, thanks largely to
the efforts of Woody Allen, whose films have consistently
mined the territory of analysis for laughs. [37]
The
profession as described by Beatrice's friend
Anne. [38]
Beatrice's
turn of phrase. [39]
Neale,
293. [40]
Neale,
293. Neale cites Working girl and Something
wild (USA 1986) as particularly explicit
examples. [41]
Neale,
293. [42]
Neale,
293. Neale's definition of contemporary necessarily only
extends to the early 1990s. He has noted that the sex
comedies of the 1950s and 1960s represent the only
significant cycle of romantic comedies where this
learning hierarchy is consistently reversed. [43]
While
there are a handful of examples of romantic comedies in
the early to mid-1990s that, along with Akerman's film,
play out a scenario of equal partnership, for example
Groundhog day (USA 1993) and The truth about
cats and dogs (USA 1996), the trend appears to be
more marked towards the end of the decade and beyond.
Some of these later examples include My best friend's
wedding (USA 1997), As good as it gets (USA
1997), Chasing Amy (USA 1997), Runaway bride
(USA 1999) and most recently What women want
(USA 2000). [44]
Janet
Bergstrom, "Keeping a distance", Sight and sound,
Vol. 9, No.11 (November 1999): 28. [45]Adrian
Martin, "Un divan à New York/A couch in
New York", Cinema papers 120 (October 1997):
40. [46]
Ivone
Margulies, 205. [47]
Catherine
Fowler, "Review: Ivone Margulies Nothing happens:
Chantal Akerman's hyperrealist everyday", Screen
39:1 (Spring 1998): 105.
5,057 words
Abstract
Chantal
Akerman's most recent film, La captive
(France/Belgium 2000), has been described as
the latest contribution to a small cluster of works
within her oeuvre that could be loosely categorised as
"stories of lovers in the city"[1].
La captive thus completes a trilogy inaugurated
with Nuit et jour (France/Belgium/Switzerland
1991) and developed in A couch in New York/Un divan
à New York (France/Belgium/Germany 1996)
[2].
While many of Akerman's films either overtly or obliquely
explore the theme of desire, these three tales of romance
situate the love story in an explicitly urban setting and
in different ways, interrogate both the formal and
thematic conventions of the romance narrative.
Setting
the (mise en) scène
Location,
location, location
Love American
style
the
formally and thematically depleted territory of the
love story. The film concentrates on the brief moments
that often constitute the turning points of
traditional feature films -- the parting, the embrace,
the moment of sexual longing. It rescues singularity
and energy precisely where the pressure of convention
has turned the representation of love into
cliché.[19]
Romancing the
comedy
"Playing" for
laughs
playing
together, having fun together, are key elements in the
ethos of romance to which romantic comedy as a whole
-- and not just the screwball films -- seems to be
dedicated.[34]
Educating
Henry
Desiring
women
An American
in Paris
©ROSE
CAPP July 2001
Endnotes
