London Film Festival, October 9, 2024 It’s eight years and barely a week since Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s article in The New York Times opened the floodgates on survivors’ stories of abuse in the film industry. Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, Ashley Judd, and Lupita Nyong’o were among scores of women who shared their experiences of gender-based violence; social media coverage turned Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement into an international phenomenon. Following in the wake of those outpourings, The Balconettes offers catharsis, of sorts, by turning the tables on abusive men. Written by Noémie Merlant and Céline Sciamma, it’s Merlant’s directorial debut. I wanted to like it. I wanted to love it. But for all its stylish art direction and smart cinematography, it didn’t move me. The film opens with a roving, restless camera traversing the open windows of a courtyard in Marseille. It’s an obvious reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), complete with dancer warming up on a balcony. The long take—panning, tilting, snaking—also recalls the Orson Welles classic A Touch of Evil (1954). There’s a brief interlude on one balcony as Denise, a Black working-class woman, murders her abusive husband (a troubling MacGuffin-esque device that seeks to acknowledge, but ultimately reinforces, misogynoir), before we meet the white, young, Balconettes. Tension builds as news readers broadcast reports of soaring temperatures, in a likely nod to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). Out on her balcony in the heat, the sexually frustrated and socially awkward Nicole gazes at the mysterious man who lives in the apartment across the road. She takes online writing classes, and is planning a novel about a woman who, in thinly disguised fiction, falls in love with a stranger on the balcony opposite her own. She explains the plot to housemate Ruby, a confident, polyamorous cam girl, who shimmers with metallic excess as she glides through the frame. The pair are joined unexpectedly by Elise, an actress escaping her overbearing husband. Playing the part of Marilyn Monroe (the 1955 heatwave comedy The Seven Year Itch springs to mind), Elise oozes femme-fatale Hollywood glamour until she strips off her wig and breaks wind. They're a compelling, if not always relatable, trio. A chance encounter with Nicole’s balcony crush lead the three women to his apartment. His space is overshadowed by oversized photographs he’s taken of models, and a drunken Ruby agrees to let him photograph her to augment her online work. All in a flash, life changes for the Balconettes. The photographer’s attempt to rape Ruby results in his death (a riff on Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom), and the women’s desperation to protect Ruby from the police. Cue some perfectly timed and always dark comedy involving a fake orgasm, refrigerators, a wheelie bin, and a stairwell sequence straight out of The Third Man (1949). Troubling the women, though, are the ghosts of the photographer and—inexplicably—those of other rapists killed by their survivors, who, for reasons that remain unclear, congregate in the photographer’s apartment. Denying any wrongdoing (of course), the men want revenge. There’s much to enjoy about the film. Souheila Yacoub’s performance as Ruby is perfect in its physical intensity. She snakes around the flat, wrapping everyone up in her insistent love for life, or coiling herself up in despair. Colour palettes are rich with green, purple, and red; fairy lights suffuse the sultry night air with a yellow glow. An erotically charged moment between Elise and Ruby reveals their sensuality as they entwine their fingers in soil. Nicole’s visit to the dead photographer’s flat reveals a darker, more peverse side to her character, and the meta-textual nature of her voiceover adds complexity to the narrative. Is this really happening, or are we watching the plot of her novel play out?
Aside from anything else it’s funny, even if you’ve encountered many of the jokes before. It cries out for watching with a group of friends. It's to be enjoyed by those who want to tear up the canon and laugh at the absurdity of abusive men. It’s a punchy, B-movie, Powerpuff Girls pastiche of a rape-revenge movie that let’s women do the talking – and chopping, sawing, and hauling, too. Owing to the abuse they encounter in hotel rooms, doctors’ surgeries, and the streets, it’s impossible not to root for the Balconettes. There’s a vital message here: you don’t have to like them to want them to win. Yet for all that the film strives for poignancy in exchanges between Nicole and the photographer’s ghost, it failed to move me in that way that I hoped. With so much going on in the film’s 104 minute runtime (three assaults, two murders, a cover up, a ghost story, and an abortion) the action is relentless. The second instance of rape does not get acknowledged as such; it’s a major oversight in a film about holding abusers to account. Character arcs and subplots are underdeveloped. The hasty denouement makes little sense. Speaking to Nicole about her novel, her patronising (older, white and male) writing tutor suggests that she cannot hope to be a revered author until she’s read the ‘greats’ of canon literature. In subverting so many classic films, The Balconettes sticks two fingers up to this idea. But while there’s a punk sensibility to Merlant’s references, the citations clutter an already busy film with contradiction – it ends up owing a debt to the canon, after all. It’s like reading a student essay that spends that expends so much energy arguing with its source material that the writer’s own ideas are lost. Given that Merlant has important things to say, this is a real shame. If a second feature as director beckons, I hope it affords an opportunity to develop her voice and give her characters more time to breathe. And, of course, there must be justice for Denise.
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