Ghost story, body horror, feminist comedy and a freshly minted edition of that very French subgenre, How to Get Rid of a Troublesome Corpse: Noémie Merlant, familiar as a fine actress from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, packs a good deal into her sophomore feature as director, The Balconettes. The message is essentially Time’s Up, maxxed out to include revenge killings; the medium is Mediterranean color. Sciamma co-wrote the script with Merlant, which may come as a surprise given that this swirl of blood and wackiness, complete with a running gag about a severed penis, is about as far from the restraint of Sciamma’s own films as could be.
We start with a weather report. It’s 46 degrees Celsius n Marseille, which is 115 degrees Fahrenheit: too damn hot. The camera hovers over the laundry-heavy balconies of a down-at-heel apartment block, which suggests we’re about to learn a lot about what goes on behind their railings. Someone is playing saxophone. There’s a kid walking on his hands. And here’s a flustered, frumpy thirty-something, peeping over her laptop at the shirtless guy in the apartment across the courtyard. The flustered voyeuse is Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), an aspiring writer. She is writing a novel, which we discover is mostly about a grand romance between a shy woman and a man who lives opposite. Dream on, Nicole.
Nicole’s immediate neighbors are quite the handful. Upstairs lives Denise, who is just about to murder her bullying husband by hitting him with a spade. (Sadly, her story is almost immediately dropped, but the murder is one of the film’s funniest sequences.) Next door is her pal Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), who describes herself as a camgirl. Ruby performs exuberant sex acts for clients over Zoom, some of whom are happy enough just watching her apply her elaborate, spangly make-up; voyeurism, as Nicole will eventually discover, there is money in voyeurism.
Nicole and Ruby will soon be joined on their sweltering balcony by Elise, played by the director herself. Elise is a scatty actress still dressed as the character she has just been playing: Marilyn Monroe. So scatty, apparently, that she will decide on a whim to come to Marseille in the middle of a heatwave, wearing a dress that looks like the next tightest thing to cling-wrap. She also manages to smash into a car that turns out to belong to the hunk (Lucas Bravo), who then invites them over to party the night away. They drink, they dance. Elise and Nicole leave Ruby posing for photographs. They never picked this man for a rapist. They certainly didn’t expect him to wind up dead.
The bulky shade of Pedro Almodovar looms over all these shenanigans, which could be read as “Women on the Verge of Heat Exhaustion” if there were more sense of it actually being hot, one of several flavors missing from Merlant’s confection of genres. Where is the sweat? Where is the wet hair sticking to the neck, the endless trickle down the spine, the wilting of spirits as heat moves into the house and won’t leave? How can Ruby possibly be wearing over-the-knee socks? Maybe it doesn’t matter in a film that tick-tocks between romp and gore, but it represents a kind of bad faith. If you were really living this story, you would never forget about the weather.
That said, there are plenty of talking points poked into the fluff, especially in the women’s encounters with men. Elise is married to Paul, a lawyer who deluges her with adoring texts in her absence, then bullies her in person. A scene of dutiful marital sex in which he spreads himself over her like a priapic octopus, as if to smother her reluctance, is a brilliant snapshot of what lack of consent looks like. Or what about Ruby, that brazenly sex-positive sprite, lying on her own bed exhausted while her supposed fans tell her to get up and dance, slut? The world seethes with abusers, but retribution is nigh. See the man on the meat hook! The severed penis that refuses to disappear! You can’t predict what will happen next – a good thing, obviously – and you can’t quite believe it when it does.
That said, I do wonder what Pedro Almodovar would have done with all these storytelling toys. Made something funnier, probably. Not that The Balconettes isn’t entertaining, as its unlikely events pile up on top of each other, but only the scene with the spade is a sure-fire laugh. Also – ironically enough, given the supposed ambient temperature – Almodovar’s women are so much warmer. None of these characters is developed enough to be likable; they are just moving pieces in a very bloody, somewhat didactic game. The point is that the men are so much worse.
Title: The Balconettes (Les Femmes au Balcon)
Section: Cannes (Midnights)
Director-screenwriter: Noémie Merlant
Cast: Noémie Merlant, Sanda Codreanu, Souhelia Yacoub
Sales agent: MK2 Films
Running time: 1 hr 45 min