Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the surface. Eugénie (Anne-Lise Heimburger), an auxiliary nurse on indefinite medical leave due to what she describes as “bad neck problems,” finds a woman passed out in her car in a parking lot and rouses her to check on her health. This hungover woman, Gladys (Fabienne Babe), is the disheveled in a way that is at odds with the prim Eugénie, yet after realizing that they went to high school together, Eugénie accepts Gladys’ invitation to accompany her to her part-time job as a cleaner. She learns that Gladys is unhoused, has no stable employment, and has contented herself to live entirely on the fringes of society, filling her time with the fleeting pleasures of dancing and drinking.
Eugénie is clearly drawn to Gladys and decides to help her, apparently for the sake of “sisterhood.” Despite her 12-year-old son Antonio’s (Antonin Battendier) obvious dislike of Gladys, she welcomes her into her home, mends her clothing, attempts to find Gladys more stable employment and integrate her into the social safety net, and repeatedly urges her to join her in volunteering to provide Ukrainian and Afghan refugees with meals. Gladys, an inveterate nihilist, dismisses each of Eugénie’s forced efforts to “help” her, but quickly becomes the solitary Eugénie’s closest friend. Stringently health-conscious and apparently lacking any meaningful social life, Eugénie starts to loosen up around Gladys; despite obviously holding her in judgment, she takes pleasure in going out dancing with her. It’s a tenuous, unequal friendship, but one apparently bearing some degree of goodwill on both sides. Maybe, Reybaud seems to suggest, the two women could learn something from each other.
Maybe not. Reybaud, by slowly escalating the tension between the two women and then by making a sharp tonal and narrative pivot in the third act, reveals their two perspectives to be irreconcilable. Gladys, who is suggested to have a dark past, does not fear death, does not care about contributing to a society she despises, and hangs around Eugénie for personal gain. Eugénie, for her part, is so rigid and repressed that the slightest transgression on Gladys’ part crumbles all of her carefully cultivated beliefs in the good of collective care.
Writer-director Reynaud exhibits a light touch and a sharp understanding of tone, navigating the ever-shifting contours of Eugénie and Gladys’ friendship with subtlety and precision. The women both appear to be easily identified types at first glance — tidy and messy, respectively — but a slew of odd character details reveal them both to be idiosyncratic, fully rounded characters, enhanced by Babe and Heimburger’s dynamic performances. Gladys dances, drinks, and smokes at unpredictable times and places, and turns on a dime from superficially joyful to coldly apathetic. Eugénie, we learn, was the only person on her block to applaud careworkers from her balcony each night during the Covid-19 pandemic, and she believes that voting for centrist candidates means her choice is “never wrong.” Reynaud moves the film along at a brisk clip — it runs barely over an hour — but drops in these key aspects of characterization lightly and without overemphasis, permitting the viewer to get to know Eugénie and Gladys as idiosyncratic individuals, just as these very different women get to know one another. It’s to Reynaud’s immense credit that the third act turn he engineers is genuinely shocking and completely re-orients the viewer’s perspective of the characters, yet as it unfurls, it never feels out of alignment with the more modest narrative that came prior.
The final minutes of the film are so extreme that some may dismiss A Balcony in Limoges as a shallow bait-and-switch, prizing shock value over depth. Yet the film, including in its provocative final scenes, contains complex, knotty layers of characterization and subtle political and philosophical discourse. Reynaud illuminates, through the microcosm of a troubled friendship, how the milquetoast values of centrist political discourse, embodied by Eugénie, can mask a desire for social cohesion that will not tolerate dissent. Gladys, the antisocial pleasure-seeker, lives her life in opposition to this control-seeking society, and while Reynaud is too attuned to human faults and frailties to cast her as righteous, nothing seems so honest in the film as her mockery of emblems of political power like Emmanuel Macron.
In a narrative device Reynaud uses sparingly, but effectively, a philosophy teacher who lives across from Eugénie occasionally interjects to share his observations about her and Gladys, like a resolutely passive counterpart to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window. He remarks that Gladys’ essence reminds him of a concept described by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Joy as a power of existence.” Eugénie, detached from her own emotions and devoted to the postures of civil society, proves herself to be unable to resist or to accept Gladys’ disruptive, raging joy.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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