While he was loosing his patience in Paris,
she was captivating his patients in New York…

He is a psychoanalyst; his name is Henry Harriston (William Hurt). Her name is Beatrice Saulnier (Juliette Binoche), she's a dancer. He lives in New York, on the Upper East Side, the "Golden Ghetto". She lives in Paris, right in the heart of Belleville, multi-ethnic Paris.

She is exuberant and happy amongst the chaos. He is obsessive and withdrawn and craves order. She needs to shake up her life, men like her too much and it's getting her down. He's had enough, of himself, New York and his patients. He places an ad in the Herald Tribune for an apartment swap. Henry is heading to Belleville while Beatrice is New York bound.

Beatrice takes to New York immediately, but when she is mistaken for Henry’s replacement she begins analysing his patients with surprising results. Nothing goes right for Henry in Paris so he returns home sooner than planned. When he is mistaken for a patient he meets Beatrice for the first time and is unexpectedly drawn into her world.

Juliette Binoche first met director Chantal Akerman in 1991 for the female lead in Nuit et Jour. Binoche was caught up in the stop-start shoot of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, and had to decline the role. Four years later she was keen to make a comedy and approached Akerman who wrote Un Divan à New York (A Couch in New York) for her.

Inspired by the films of Lubitsch and Cukor, Akerman’s shrewd comedy was a departure from her European auteur dramas mixing qualities of American and European cinema in an original and unlikely way.