The Balconettes: The Truth in a Woman
by Karenna Blomberg
Gone Girl, Promising Young Woman, Jennifer’s Body. If you’re partial to stories about beautiful women who kill terrible men, you and I might get along. Subversive feminist media will always have a place in my heart, and that’s why my number one most anticipated watch going into the Seattle International Film Festival was French multihyphenate Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes. That said, the femme-powered comedy/thriller/drama met some of my hopes and expectations, fell short of others, and surpassed my imagination, leaving me in awe at times and horror in others.
Merlant, most famous for her role in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), wrote, directed and stars in the movie, alongside actresses Souheila Yacoub and Sanda Codreanu. The three play Élise (an indecisive actress), and her longtime friends, roommates Ruby (an outgoing camgirl) and Nicole (a type A author). The trio pass the time through a blistering Marseilles heatwave on Nicole and Ruby’s balcony, eyeing a sexy neighbor through the window and devising a plan to get him to invite them over. However, their plans quickly go awry when the seemingly charming Magnani sexually assaults Ruby, and she accidentally kills him in self-defense. The girls’ resulting endeavor to cover up the incident turns darkly funny, haunting, confusing, and deeply affecting.
My biggest gripe about the film: The plotting is on the weak side. You cannot draw one solid line to follow, neither emotionally nor logically, from the opening scene through to the ending. Everything meanders, and it only ends up somewhere about three quarters of the time. The blend of surreality and extreme stomach-turning reality means that there are times where you are unsure if some moments are real or if you’re supposed to know whether they are real at all. You are confused about whether you are supposed to be confused. It makes everything else around it feel just a tad underbaked.
That said, the acting in this movie—specifically the performances from the three leads—is outstanding. Merlant, Yacoub, and Condreanu play off of each other naturally in both the comedic and tender moments. Haunted by their traumatic experience and terrified of the repercussions, the serious scenes are agonizingly sincere, while scenes of their panicked but committed attempts to hide Magnani’s body are played perfectly, like a bloodier 9 to 5 (1980).
The Balconettes is a classically third-wave feminist jaunt, with integral themes of solidarity and ownership of one’s body. It laments the fact that sexuality can be a valuable tool for a woman, but also one that can very easily be twisted and used against her. The women in The Balconettes are not glamorized; they are sexual but not always sexy; they are loud and sometimes disgusting; they are sometimes hysterical and other times grounded. They are three dimensional. I have hardly ever seen a movie more capably personify and de-objectify its female protagonists, while still having their sex lives and sexuality play a multifaceted role in the narrative. Merlant proves here that she is a bold, sharp director, able to pack an entire semester’s worth of feminist film study material into about an hour and a half, while still managing to sidestep cliche.
The production design is also notable: The world of the film is easy to fall into due to the colorful mise-en-scène and visceral effects. Not to mention that the Marseilles location, heavy with stone and old-world charm, subtly underlines Ruby, Nicole, and Élise’s seemingly insurmountable push against the barbarism of men. The simplistic soundtrack is also a perfect grounding element for a frequently multi-tonal narrative.
As I think about it more, I feel that one line from the movie summarizes its main idea in perfect brevity: “The mystery of a woman is not a choice, it’s a punishment.” The Balconettes is so many things in such a relatively short amount of time—hilarious, intriguing, liberating, sickening. It is a celebration of complex women, survivorship, and community. It is not gentle or feel-good by any means. You will not encounter any praise here for the “feminine mystique.” Unlike those other women-who-kill movies I mentioned earlier, The Balconettes is entirely divorced from the idea of a confident woman getting perfect revenge on male abusers and manipulators. While my initial thoughts on the film were mixed, this punchy, at times surreal depiction of female anguish and solidarity has nested itself within me.