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A Chantal Akerman movie in which a character mentions Power Rangers.

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i always tend to describe juliette binoche as "radiant" — she has an overwhelmingly brilliant presence both on and off screen (on a literal note, please watch this skincare routine, one of my favorite instagram posts). anyway i think akerman captured her in her most luminous form here. i mean, i get why edgard (?) the dog follows her everywhere! btw, great canine acting, i too would be obsessed with her. i also love how binoche plays up her quirky frenchness even more (that accent is exaggerated, oui?) but it's never cloying. a rom-com that requires a bit of suspension of disbelief never hurt anyone, especially when it's so magical. left my heart open and tender.

Review by Carlos Valladares ★★★★★ Liked

Chantal Akerman is my Nora Ephron. The best movie to link love, psychoanalysis, acting, and the cinema—all with a sublime levity you can get high on.

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Defying its reputation, Chantal Akerman’s barely regarded international rom-com starring William Hurt and Juliette Binoche is a hilarious and moving study of confession vs expression that retains Akerman’s keen eye for inhabited spaces and fondness for heavily conceptual genre constructs while still being a genuinely commercial crowd-pleaser. It’s even got a big role for a cute dog and a few Buster Keaton-esque pratfalls!

Hurt plays a rich New York psychoanalyst desperate for escape from his constantly-calling patients, and Binoche plays a Parisian dancer hounded by obsessed lovers. Hurt places an ad for a temporary apartment swap, and the two switch places without meeting each other. Binoche is soon accidentally taking over his psych practice while Hurt is getting beaten up…

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Yes, I love European Arthouse cinema, how could you tell? Specifically the work of (Queens) Chantal Akerman and Juliette Binoche, if you must know.

One star for each of her eyes. 

Two more for the way she strolls into her apartment that isn’t really her apartment yet, tosses her cute little woolly hat on the floor and proceeds to go straight for the shower, still fully dressed, robe et. al. Another for when she jumps into a lake to save a dog. No hesitation. Again… fully clothed. 

One last point for the way in which she talks up a movie to a cynical friend. About how it was just about the best thing and has changed her life for the…

Review by Ethan Vestby ★★★½

Premiering in Belgium just as NBC’s hit show Friends was practically obliterating class consciousness amongst Americans, Chantal Akerman tried to warn us of the shadow being cast over the western world. A kill the bourgeois text trojan horsed as through what I’m sure was referred to in a press kit as a Lubitsch homage, A Couch in New York is quietly amongst Akerman’s most revolutionary works. 

One needs to look no further than William Hurt as the comically named John Wire. In a performance that alternates between full bozo mode and the whispery boredom that came to define all his work The Sci-Fi Channel Presents Frank Herbert’s Dune onwards, it feels like a covert feminist critique of what es for a…

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1st Chantal Akerman

A strange choice for my first Akerman, but then again, I've never liked doing things the normal way. If Jeanne Dielmann is the apex of her career, then it makes sense to see other films by her first so I can appreciate the masterpiece more. And with a long train journey on my hands and this on MUBI, I thought it would be a wise idea to ease into the pool with one of her more unusual but accessible films. And it was absolutely the right decision. Couch... manages to contain many of Akerman's repeated pre-occupations with space, alienation and cultural identity but within the context of a light romcom. The plot is simple- a French woman…

Review by Scout Tafoya ★★★½

149/200

Proof that Akerman could do anything, including beat Nora Ephron at her own game.

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An uncharacteristically full house for the Melbourne Cinémathèque B-side tonight; all I need from this life is to watch my favourite romantic comedies on the big screen with a crowd. Beautiful print and stellar effort in live subtitling the French bits through PowerPoint, with a conspicuous mention that the subs were yellow which got a soft cheer from me. 

Still bowled over by Akerman’s sound work (watching The Man with the Suitcase yesterday was a wonderful primer in showing off how good she is at comedy), her lovingly frank depiction of both apartments changing overtime, and how this is simultaneously totally hers and an unabashed New York rom-com, the kind you’d leave the cinema arguing over its happy ending. Also the fiancée is basically C. C. Babcock from the Nanny, yet another reason to love this thing.

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Seeing Akerman work with these hyper-artificial stylings is initially quite bracing, even more so than in GOLDEN EIGHTIES because of the shock and weirdness of her English language dialogue (which feels more deliberate, or at least appropriate, as the film goes on). But of course there’s more to this than some fumbled attempt at a straight-forward rom-com, and the magic here is in the (not entirely one-way) motion from artifice to intimacy, of emotional facades coming down to reveal infinite worlds, like another image of NOT ACTUALLY Binoche AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ACTRESS (Thank you Kevin) in THREE COLOURS: RED. In a way this clarifies Akerman’s whole project - this is as much concerned with what lies beneath the surfaces of…

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Not a lot of love for this one on IMDb or LB, but I liked it a lot. A delightful, gentle romantic comedy that feels more like a classic 50s romcom than a 90s version of the genre.
Two of my favourite actors, Juliette Binoche and William Hurt, play Beatrice and Henry who don't know each other but spontaneously decide on a house swap for a month - hers a little run-down but homely flat in Paris and his a modern, spacious but austere apartment in Manhattan, where he works as a psychoanalyst.
Both find themselves becoming embroiled in the other's lifestyle until Henry returns to New York early and is surprised to find Beatrice treating some of his patients.…

Review by Manoj Panicker ★★½

You would think that Juliette Binoche in a Chantal Akerman movie would be a match made in heaven. And the fact that this movie carries the vibe of a Nora Ephron-Meg Ryan rom-com had me excited in the beginning.

Two strangers from two countries decide to swap apartments to take a break from the life they carry. A psychoanalyst named Henry Harriston from New York and a dancer from Paris named Béatrice Saulnier, where the former seeks escape from his clients and the latter from the men who bother her with proposals. Things get complicated when Henry ends up giving advice to Beatrice's irers while she starts to handle Henry's clients. But when Henry goes to confront Beatrice about handling…