Tuesday, October 06, 2015

au revoir, chantal...

The singular Chantal Akerman has died. The Belgian feminist-auteur designed films that were artistically daring and sophisticated, even for France where she worked for 45 years. And yet, they were spare, minimal.  She made minutiae painterly and utterly fascinating.

Akerman began making shorts in 1968 and had one amazing short feature,"Hôtel Monterey," before she broke through in 1975 with the ambitiously modest (or modestly ambitious) “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” With these two films, she secured a rarified niche for herself in filmmaking, a place where she was the only denizen.

"Hôtel Monterey" is a 65-minute portrait of the New York residential hotel, in which her camera eyes every nook and cranny, almost compulsively so.

With “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” starring the hugely affecting Delphine Seyrig in a one-woman, three-hour-and-21-minute exercise, expands the previous film's vision and extends it to a human. Both films are constrained by time - with the Hôtel Monterey profiled during one long night and Jeanne Dielman during a single day.  And both are haunted by loneliness and a sense of emptiness. 

Human interaction is an infrequent, alien notion in these films, daringly so. One can hardly imagine an American studio supporting such eclectic, challenging work from any filmmaker, least of all a female director.

Akerman, who was 65 when she died on October 5th, made 47 features and shorts, too many of them unseen in this country or by me.  Included were the 1986 musical, "Golden Eighties" (aka, "Window Shopping") and the 1983 document about its painstaking preparation, "Les années 80."

Then, there was the atypical movie in which Akerman seemed to be invading Nora Ephron/Nancy Meyer territory - 1996's  "A Couch in New York"/"Un divan à New York." Much like Meyer's "The Holiday," this is the one about two people who switch residences - in the case of the Akerman film, Juliette Binoche, a Parisian woman feeling pressured by all the men in her life, and William Hurt, a New York psychotherapist tired of his patients and their problems. (BTW, "A Couch in New York" predates "The Holiday" by ten years.)

So, the two swap places - and, by extension, lives. Yes, both also become involved in the other person's life, with Binoche actually counseling Hurt's patients and Hurt being pursued by one of Binoche's jealous boyfriends. When he finally gets fed up, Hurt moves back to New York, meets up with Binoche and, to paraphrase the old song, something gives.

What sounds like a generic, formulaic sitcom turns into something quite magical in Akerman's hands. She deftly targets the hapless transfer of people to different places as something not just playful but potentially unstable and dangerous. Relationships usually take one into uncharted territory and that's what Akerman toys with so cynically here.

What makes her two difficult people seem so wrong for each other is exactly what makes them so exactly perfect for one another.

Not surprisingly, "A Couch in New York" has the kind of foreign fizz that's an acquired taste, especially for American audiences who are too easily put off by anything even remotely, well, foreign.


The film may be Akerman's most accessible and commerical, but its distinctive technique is pure Chantal, resplendent with tiny bits of business and, again, hugely observant. A prime Cinema Obscura.

10 comments:

  1. I saw A COUCH IN NEW YORK when it - briefly - came out. A romantic film like this shouldn't really be up Akerman’s alley but it worked. I like that she made the Binoche character seem both graceful and uncharacteristically strident. Of all the films of hers that I've seen, this is the least of them. But I can’t dismiss it – it stayed in my mind as something I’d like to see again.

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  2. Every filmmaker eventually wants his or her work to be accessible and commercial, even someone who spends a career doing avant-garde stuff. It's no surprise that Akerman made a film like "A Couch in New York." It seems like the kind of movies her fans would either embrace totally or absolutely hate.

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  3. Brian Lucas9:32 PM

    I would not dare compare Akerman's "A Couch in New York" to any of her European output. And, alas, it was not the breakthrough it was mean to be, comparable to what happened with Luc Besson, for example. She should stick to what she does best.

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  4. Sheila10:14 PM

    I assume that "A Couch in New York" was shot in English, right?

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  5. The version I saw - in this country - was largely in English with some French. However, I wouldn't be surprised if Akerman shot two versions of the film - in each language.

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  6. Charlotte5:30 AM

    I can't recall if "A Couch in New York" ever played in a theater here in N.Y. but I remember that it got a showing at the Anthology Film Archive back in 1997. I remember because I saw it there on my birthday. A lovely little film and a nice way to spend a birthday.

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  7. Charlotte! That's where I saw it, too, although it did open briefly in Northern California when I was reviewing there. It was a quick in-out engagement at an art theater in Sacramento, after it had played the AFA.

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  8. Marvin8:03 AM

    Your article about Chantal Ackerman was great. I, too, wish that I could see a lot more of her films than I have already seen.

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  9. Well done, Joe! Chantal Akerman was hauntingly spare -- it was more like what wasn't said that told the story. I heard on one of the Euronews she had committed suicide.

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  10. Kiki- Yes, her sister Sylvane reports it as a suicide but the Paris “authorities” are saying that the details behind her death are “sketchy.”

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