THE BALCONETTES (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney
Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes is a deliciously outré response to the tacit complicity of the French film and cultural institutions in enabling misogyny and gendered violence. With a script co-authored by Céline Sciamma who worked with Merlant in her luscious lesbian period romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire, neither woman is concerned with sparing the feelings of men who exhaust and extinguish the luminosity and autonomy of women.
During a heatwave in Marseilles the temperature in not the only thing that has become unbearable. A woman (Nadège Beausson-Diagne) awakens bloodied and bruised after her piggish husband once again beats her. He left her unconscious on the balcony overnight and now demands she stops being a lazy cow and attends to her household duties. She cracks and hits him on the head splitting open his skull. The job isn’t quite done so she ends up smothering him with her derriere. She visits her downstairs neighbour, Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) and jokes that he has fallen to his death, and it is a blessed relief.
Nicole sits on her balcony with her laptop waiting for inspiration to strike so she can write her romance novel. Inspiration comes in the form of a very handsome and mysterious neighbour (Lucas Bravo) in the apartment across the way.
Nicole’s flatmate, the sexually liberated ‘cam girl’ Ruby (Souheila Yacoub) is unashamed of her body or her job providing she dictates the terms of the play. Breasts, she notes, seem to only be a problem when men decide they own them. Sitting out on her balcony in the sweltering heat topless is an issue for the men and easily scandalised women looking at her.
Arriving in a panic and flush of nerves is Élise (Noémie Merlant) who has decided to escape from her patronising and smothering lawyer husband, Paul (Christophe Montenez) running off the set of the television movie she was filming in Paris still in costume. Élise hits the neighbour’s expensive car. He leaves the apartment and enters the women’s lives.
Ruby flirts with the neighbour (Nicole bemoans of course he will be enchanted by her) and text message banter goes back and forth. He invites the trio he is now watching on their balcony over for drinks as payment for the damage to his car. Nicole is nervous about going as she views herself as awkward and plain. Ruby and Élise cajole her and boost her self-confidence.
The neighbour turns out to be a wealthy art dealer/photographer who feels he captures the ‘essence of women’ in his portraits. He’s aware of his allure and status. Once he learns Ruby is a cam girl and Élise an actress he turns the party up to eleven. Élise ends up sick and Nicole needs to take her home. Ruby stays as she’s high, having fun, and the neighbour promised to photograph her.
The next morning a blood covered and shocked Ruby stumbles into the house unable to speak. Something terrible happened the night before and the neighbour is dead, very unmistakeably, skewered on a metal pole, dead.
The script riffs on the crime comedies of Ozon and Almodóvar as the three women try to work out how they’re going to get rid of a body in a neighbourhood where everyone sees everything (unless they don’t want to – like domestic violence). It’s goofy and often silly. Sometimes quite funny, such as when Nicole realises she has accidentally pocketed the neighbour’s severed penis and puts it in her freezer.
What isn’t silly is how destroyed the once vivacious Ruby is. Silenced by post sexual assault trauma, she finally narrates her experience to an empty cam room. Or how the women will be called dirty whores, frigid neurotics, and crazy bitches by men they know or complete strangers.
The Balconettes has issues with shifting tones. It’s a comedy, crime thriller, fantasy, a feminist call to arms, and satire where women en masse across France are permanently fixing their problems with an abusive patriarchy. Subtle isn’t Merlant’s goal, and nor should it be, but the film struggles with where it wants the emphasis to be. Trying to tie it up in a messy bow with parts of the narrative belonging to Nicole’s novel doesn’t neaten the film enough.
Even with the rough edges, The Balconettes succeeds in depicting the double standards still applied to women and the ownership of their image and bodies. Women young, old, fat, and thin, walk the streets and dance in freedom away from the weight of men in one stunning scene.
Noémie Merlant and Céline Sciamma imagine a world in The Balconettes where France shouts Liberté, égalité, sororité and while the film isn’t an incendiary revolutionary document on its own, it’s adding to the voices growing louder all the time.
