A couch in New York
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | A couch in New York |
| Original title | Un divan à New York |
| Country of production | Belgium , Germany , France |
| original language | English , French |
| Publishing year | 1996 |
| length | 109 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Chantal Akerman |
| script | Chantal Akerman, Jean-Louis Benoît |
| production |
Diana Elbaum , Régine Konckier , Robin O'Hara , Jean-Luc Ormières , Jacqueline Pierreux , Ingrid Windisch |
| music | Sonia Wieder-Atherton |
| camera | Dietrich Lohmann |
| cut | Claire Atherton |
| occupation | |
| |
A Couch in New York is a Belgian-German-French comedy film directed by Chantal Akerman from 1996 .
action
The New York psychoanalyst Henry Harriston and the Parisian dancer Beatrice Saulnier exchange their apartments via an advertisement without having met personally. Both flee from the context of their lives: the fun-loving, somewhat chaotic Beatrice is pursued by her admirers. Henry feels burned out and can no longer bear his patients. He's stuck and bored, lives in an obsessive manner, and has an upper class fiancée whose life is geared towards outward appearance. Beatrice comes to New York City and moves into the apartment and practice of the therapist, while Henry moves into Beatrice's Paris apartment and is immediately watched suspiciously by her rejected lovers.
Beatrice unintentionally finds herself in the role of the therapist and "treats" Harriston's patients as his vacation replacement. She actually only listens in a friendly and silent manner. The therapy-experienced friend Anne explains to Beatrice that psychoanalysts emphasize particularly important sentences of the patients by clearing their throats or filling words like "aha" or "ja-a". Beatrice applies this intuitively; However, she is therapeutically successful because of her warmth, affection and empathy: the patients are visibly better off, even the psychoanalyst's dog, and the plants grow as lush “as in the jungle”.
Henry has landed in his role as a therapist again in Paris - he is allowed to listen to Beatrice's unhappy lover. So he flies back to New York. At the entrance to the house he sees one of his patients and is surprised to find that the man looks happier than ever before.
When he tries to enter his practice, Anne, who plays the receptionist for Beatrice, mistook him for a patient and turned him away. Henry does not clear up the mistake, but makes an appointment by phone under a false name. He is silent on his own couch; he is confronted with his desolate inner life and his stuck life situation. However, he can expose himself to this situation because he feels: Beatrice has precisely that interest in people that he can no longer muster as a therapist.
Beatrice is always herself, sincere, compassionate and direct. Henry does not reveal himself, but arranges new meetings. He seems to take himself and his life more seriously again. He also grapples with the rift between his simple origins and his current secure, luxurious life. In the therapy sessions with Beatrice, but also on the way to the elevator and during a dramatic search for the dog, the two of them become more and more familiar. The viewer suspects it and both speak out to their friends: They fell in love with each other. Henry is still the "patient John Wire".
He doesn't dare to confess his love to her - she thinks he can only see her as the therapist. As such, she mustn't be in love with a patient anyway, her friend explains. She flees sadly to her home in Paris. Henry follows her, is in front of her at the airport and promptly snatches the seat away from her, so that she has to take a later plane. So he is - again as a subtenant - in front of her in her apartment, and while he is watering the flowers on the balcony, Beatrice enters the neighboring balcony from a friend's apartment, from where she can hear Henry or John Wire, but not see. During their dialogue through the hedge from balcony to balcony, in which Beatrice told him - the therapist from New York - that she had fallen in love with the patient John Wire and therefore left New York, Henry finally reveals herself. The way through the stairwell is too long - Beatrice wants to go straight over the railing into his arms, and Henry admits that he messed up her apartment again and threw her nightgown back on the floor so she could feel comfortable.
background
The film was shot on a few original locations in New York City and Paris as well as in the also co-producing Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam . This is how apartment sets were created in the Babelsberg film studios and trick shots were also used: The couch that appears in the film was never actually in New York, but in the Marlene Dietrich Hall of the studios. Model maker Marion Fleischer had recreated a 21-meter-long backdrop of Central Park there. The model was nine meters behind the couch. The costumes were designed by Edith Vesperini and Stéphane Rollot .
Reviews
Jack Sommersby complained on efilmcritic.com how bad it was to see two talented actors in "something so unplayable".
The magazine TV direkt wrote, however, that the film was "charming" and had "a lot of meaning".
Awards
Chantal Akerman won a prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1996 and was nominated for another prize at this film festival.
Web links
- A Couch in New York in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- A Couch in New York at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ PNN: "POTSDAM EXCLUSIVE - Central Park through the curtain" www.pnn.de from February 26, 2009, accessed on February 3, 2018
- ↑ iMDb: “A Couch in New York” www.imdb.de, accessed on February 3, 2018
- ↑ cf. rottentomatoes.com
- ↑ TV direkt 8/2007, page 61.