Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes begins with a corker of an opening shot. Predominantly taking place at adjoining apartment complexes in Marseille separated by a courtyard, the film sets the stage by having the camera hover weightlessly as it moves to-and-fro between the buildings in a long unbroken take, peering into the domiciles of a dozen denizens as they go about their lives on a sweltering summer day. The camera eventually rests on the face of a woman lying on her side on a balcony, motionless and appearing dead. Her face and body are covered in bruises, which we can assume are courtesy of her lout of a husband who stands over her, screaming at her to wake up before splashing water on her face. The woman does wake up, and we follow her from the balcony into her apartment (keep in mind, there still hasn’t been a visible edit up to this point) as she picks up a metal dustpan and proceeds to brain her husband with it, splitting the back of his head open and splattering blood all over the wall. The man crawls away in a futile retreat, but his wife catches up with him, smothering him to death by sitting on his face. As a technical achievement, it’s a flex that doesn’t quite call attention to itself (the sleepiness of the camera’s path negates some of the formalist showboating), while being almost Hitchcockian in its visual storytelling and sly acknowledgment of the dark misdeeds happening outside the view of the public. It smartly upends the viewer’s expectations and is cheerfully disreputable. Regrettably, it barely reflects the ambitions, style, or relative cleverness of the film that follows. The disreputable part, however, that it has in spades.
Despite the overt homage to Rear Window, what the film most resembles is middle-period Almodóvar, what with its prominent use of vibrant primary colors, embrace of cheeky impropriety and melodrama, and reverence for jiggly yet frazzled women (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown would make a perfectly appropriate title for this). The woman we see murdering her husband in the opening scene is actually incidental to the plot of The Balconettes, which instead focuses on three spirited young women sharing an apartment. Sanda Codreanu’s Nicole is the most studious of the three, although that’s not saying much; an aspiring novelist, she spends her days sitting on her balcony longing for the shirtless hunk (Lucas Bravo) across the way. Her roommate Ruby (Souheila Yacoub) is a polyamorous libertine who performs erotic webcam shows from her bedroom and is more commonly shown wearing garish face paint than a shirt (the film’s approach to casual nudity is decidedly “European”). Rounding out the trio is Merlant’s Élise, an absentminded television actress — giving the character a platinum Marilyn wig is almost hat-on-a-hat territory — temporarily hiding from her domineering husband. A minor fender bender puts the three women on the radar of Bravo’s neighbor (he’s literally credited only as “le voisin”), and after some across-the-courtyard flirting, he invites the ladies over one night for drinks. A photographer who treats his apartment as a personal studio-cum-seduction lair, the neighbor spends the evening drinking and dancing with the women while wallflower Nicole comes to the crushing realization that the man she’s swooned over from afar is more interested in Ruby. Eventually, Nicole and Élise head back to their apartment, leaving Ruby behind for further misadventures, only for her to arrive home hours later, half-naked, in an aphasiac state, and covered in someone else’s blood.
Returning to the scene of the crime (as it were) in the light of day, the three women find the neighbor in a death tableau that seemingly defies all logic but makes for a queasy image: the deceased is suspended in mid-air, impaled on a light stand and missing a not-insignificant amount of his penis (although isn’t any amount “significant” to its owner). With Ruby still unable to speak to what happened, although the implication being clear enough, the three women go about wiping the place down and stashing the body in a chest freezer (ever the romantic, Nicole finds the missing member and tucks it away in a Tupperware container in the back of her refrigerator for safe keeping). Having gotten away with it for now — although exactly what transpired the night before remains mostly inferred — the women only need to find an opportune time to dismember and dispose of the body (a televised newscast tells us that a possible serial killer has been depositing their victims in the waters just offshore, which is a rather convenient development). Also, Nicole is being visited by a series of ghosts, all men who were scoundrels and abusers in life, who want to complain to her about how unfair it is to now be dead. And if you think that’s a rough non sequitur awkwardly introduced late in a review, well that’s simply the way The Balconettes rolls.
The Almodóvar comparison is instructive enough that it’s worth revisiting. While Merlant, in only her second film as a director, has wholeheartedly embraced the Spanish filmmaker’s MPAA-scandalizing bawdiness and norm-tweaking — there’s even a running gag where Élise loudly passes gas whenever she’s nervous that feels like a nod to Volver — she’s learning the hard way that navigating divergent tones with hairpin turns is a rare talent and one that presently escapes her. The Balconettes can be viewed as part of France’s belated reckoning with #MeToo (the film was written by Merlant and her Portrait of a Lady on Fire director, Céline Sciamma, both of whom famously stormed out of the César Awards in 2020 after Roman Polanski received a directing prize) and specifically its depiction of Ruby’s trauma is about the only thing the film doesn’t take in jest; sidelining Yacoub for long stretches of the film so she can curl up in her bed while anonymous men watching on her livestream urge her to do something sexy already. But it’s difficult to reconcile that trauma with what we’re led to believe is the restorative power of masturbating alongside your friend, with Ruby and Élise each rocking back and forth to completion on the arm of a piece of patio furniture after comparing how many men they’ve respectively slept with. Or the film having Élise receive a face full of ejaculate as both a cruel punchline and a button on her dysfunctional marriage. Or, for that matter, an entire subplot that finds Nicole sneaking away to perform restorative surgery — basically a reverse circumcision — on the dead neighbor, which feels really self-defeating once you remember the plan is to hack up the body later. The film’s lack of squeamishness about sex and physiology, in particular, is admirable, especially at a time when puritanism amongst Gen Z has led to regularly recurring discourses about its “necessity” on screen, but at a certain point, the film’s libidinousness starts to feel like a smutty private joke that doesn’t extend to the audience. Or worse, just kind of juvenile.
Further, Merlant’s hand behind the camera is clumsy and inconsistent. Despite only featuring three actors for much of the film, it often loses track of characters, struggling to juggle long digressions or failing to resolve the majority of its plot threads in a satisfying manner. Bet you’re still wondering about the significance of those ghosts. Ditto! And for every scene that feels stately in its direction — like the aforementioned opening crane shot — we then get sequences filmed in jittery handheld replete with shaky cam and crash zooms. There are some really daring choices being made here, like the devastating simplicity in Merlant’s staging of a scene in an abortionist’s office; the actress-filmmaker exposed in a way rarely seen in non-pornographic works as she sits in stirrups, while on the far side of the frame, the doctor absentmindedly busies himself at his desk for a small eternity. But that’s contrasted with something like a walk-and-talk gunked up with unmotivated tilts and pans as the camera drunkenly lurches in a parabola around the actors. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, with the film incorporating wildly different styles, really, on a scene-by-scene basis. Do you prefer it when things are shot to look like a De Palma film or TV’s The Office? Get yourself a film that does both! Yet The Balconettes is somewhat insulated from criticism as, acknowledgment of assault and all-around unreliability of men notwithstanding, it’s essentially a frothy French lark about pretty girls wanting to have fun (that’s all they really want!) in a state of sweaty, half-undress, and it’s hard to fight the film on those terms. You can point out how sloppy and underbaked it is but, then, you didn’t really buy that magazine for the articles, did you?
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