On the couch

Chantal Akerman hits New York

There are certainly pleasurable moments in Chantal Akerman's A Couch in New York, which plays November 22, 25, and 26 at the Harvard Film Archive. Juliette Binoche, starring as a Frenchwoman, Béatrice, in New York, leaning into the breeze out the window of her Yellow Cab. William Hurt, playing psychoanalyst Henry Harriston, sauntering across Brooklyn Bridge at twilight. Intricate traveling shots down multicultural Brooklyn streets in which it's impossible to unravel whether the crowded sidewalks contain randomly scattered real-life extras or have been choreographed beautifully with those extras.

Otherwise, A Couch in New York comes off as an agreeable, fairly conventional romantic comedy made by someone who well understands formula and has mastered, for good or bad, the mechanics of East Side/Central Park New York Woody Allens: rarefied '90s stories of the rich with a retro Hollywood-in-the-'30s feel.

"But would you have known that Akerman was the filmmaker?" asked the person who watched it with me. No way, I replied, and yet it's the signed work by the brilliant Belgian avant-garde cinéaste who is in residence this year at Harvard's Carpenter Center.

Her other films are more overtly challenging and complex. Yet A Couch in New York is almost the least accessible because the directorial intentions are so elusive.

Is Akerman playing at making a goodhearted, slightly sentimental, bourgeois romance, with Astaire-Rogers mixed-up identities? Or is she actually making one of those? Is A Couch in New York a quiet little cinema joke, all muffled ironies? Or is the movie as straight-arrow as it seems?

Here's the Hollywood-style high-concept story: Hurt's arid, uptight New York analyst, Henry, swaps apartments through the Herald Tribune with Binoche's Béatrice. She turns his scrubbed suite into a comfort zone, with scattered clothes, overrun plants, and his big dog allowed to romp freely. He starts to clean up her messy Paris flat, but it's quickly stormed by her mourning courters. All seek even a perfume whiff of their vanished B´atrice.

Simultaneously, Henry's patients are desperate for help, any help. B´atrice assumes his psychoanalytic practice. Although a total amateur, she proves a lifesaver (more than he?) for his all-male clients, because of her sympathetic, directive, personal approach. Meanwhile, he listens to her mooing boyfriends until he can't take any more. This American in Paris returns secretly to New York and secretly to spy on Béatrice. Who is she?

He comes to her office, pretending to be a patient, John Wire. Soon he's spilling his guts out about his anxieties. And she's falling in love with the man on her couch, hoping that his obvious feelings for her are more than (a new word for her) a "transference."

Adhering to '30s Hollywood genre traditions, Akerman supplies a confidant for each protagonist (Stephanie Buttle, Paul Guilfoyle), plus a hysterical society dame (Barbara Garrick) as Henry's appropriately unsuitable fiancée. For the first time, Akerman uses international stars for her leads. And in line with the non-subversive surface of her movie, she doesn't scramble at all their expected screen personas.

Binoche is a sensual flower, melting hearts with her honesty and vulnerability. As usual, Hurt hurts, his insides smoldering subtext. There's only one place in the movie where Akerman goes consistently overboard, and we know she is winking at the story: with the affable dog, who chases a taxi to the airport!

Again, why did she make A Couch in New York? "My decision to aim for comedy and humor," she explains in a press-kit interview," may be because, at a quite difficult time in my life (my father was slowly dying), I didn't have any choice except to write a comedy to survive."

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Impressive as Bess's husband in Breaking the Waves, Stellan Skarsgärd triumphs again as a demented, ruffian seaman, Randbaeck, in the potent Norwegian psychological thriller, Zero Kelvin, at the MFA various times between November 21 and December 5. Randbaeck and his partner, Holm (Björn Sundquist), return to dock after a year in Greenland of trapping and scientific experiments. Randbaeck is revolted that, for their next 12-month voyage, they are expected to take with them an Oslo landlubber, Larsen (Gard Eidsvold), who writes poems and also sentimental letters to his girlfriend.

Norwegian film director/screenwriter Hans Petter Moland is an admirer of Glengarry Glen Ross, and much of Zero Kelvin is a Mamet-like male war of blasphemes. Nobody is as fiercely profane as Randbaeck: "Tell that horse dick one day I'll shit down his throat." Randbaeck especially hounds Larsen, saying, "His hands are like a little girl's. We can let him cook and watch house." It doesn't take much Freud to see a closeted gay subtext here, old navy stuff in Norway, like Melville's Captain Vere hovering sadistically about fair Billy Budd.

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This week's mucho gala film event: a Boston Film/Video Foundation ceremony and dinner at the Massachusetts State House on November 22, honoring filmmaker Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, etc.). Tickets are $85 and $100, to benefit the BF/VF. Call 536-1540.