A flirtation across balconies with the cute guy opposite goes chaotically awry for three roommates in Marseille in this uneven but enjoyable Cannes Midnight premiere.
For sheer tension or thematic lucidity, nothing in “The Balconettes” quite tops the near self-contained, minutes-long short that opens actor director Noémie Merlant’s frenetic, heatstruck genre mashup. On a 115-degree summer afternoon in an airless Marseilles apartment block, a put-upon middle-aged wife passes out on her balcony. Awoken with a splash of water by her brutish husband, who orders her back to her chores, the poor woman snaps: Rising to her feet, she knocks him senseless with a metal dustpan, smothers him with a towel and sits on him until all life has ebbed from his body. Not a jot of backstory is needed for this supremely satisfying vignette, which earns the film its first bout of applause.
That is the last we see of this character’s predicament barring one brief shot later on of her being led away from the building by police (cue some boos to match the earlier cheers). Instead “The Balconettes” swivels to a neighbouring flat, where a younger trio of women are prompted into extreme action by male behaviours they deem intolerable. Their rather more convoluted story isn’t as tightly or viscerally pleasing as the miniature tale of woe that precedes it but then wilful illogic is more or less Merlant’s second behind the camera outing’s (following 2021 shaggy road movie “Mi Iubita Mon Amour”) raison d’être. Almost all of its plotting here is driven by sun drunk midsummer madness that powers bad decisions and worse outcomes like an engine before things get supernatural.
We never see any other part of this character’s story beyond later being led away from the building by police. (Some boos for this are a fitting complement to the earlier applause.) Instead, “The Balconettes” moves to an apartment next door where three younger women take extreme measures against unacceptable male behavior. Their story is more complicated and less viscerally satisfying than the short that came before it, but Merlant’s second film as a director following last year’s shaggy road movie “Mi Iubita Mon Amour” seems designed for willful illogic. Almost everything in the film happens because of the kind of midsummer madness brought on by too much sun, which leads to bad snap decisions and even worse outcomes and that’s before things start getting supernatural.
Merlant, who starred in films such as “Tár” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” wrote “The Balconettes” with her former collaborator Sciamma best known as the writer-director of 2019 Cannes sensation “Portrait.” But this isn’t exactly what one expects from Sciamma either, even allowing for her taste for oddball genre exercises. It’s being unveiled, aptly enough, as part of Cannes’ perennially wild Midnight lineup. Rather, what we have here is closer to early Pedro Almodóvar filtered through Merlant’s own sensibility: saturated hot-hued melodrama piled high with blood and sex; gabby female bonding within a tightly confined living space; a flagrantly sex-positive cam-girl character (the most eye catching presence here) drafted in from Planet Pedro with a Gallic twist applied (Souheila Yacoub).
Ruby shares a shabby chic flat with Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), a slightly more retiring aspiring author given to stealing glances at Magnani across the street from their respective balconies, while their actress friend Élise (Merlant herself) appears to be staying there most of the time, despite having a clingy husband, Paul (Christophe Montenez), in another city. The script never quite convinces us why these three mismatched women are such close pals, but they make for an energetic trio onscreen, particularly when Élise arrives at the apartment still in platinum Marilyn Monroe drag from her current film shoot, another Almodóvarean touch in a state over Paul, whose nonstop calls she finds more than a little harassing: In her mania en route, she dinged Magnani’s prized vintage car.
Hyper-social Ruby solves the Magnani issue in fact, she gets all three women invited to his apartment for a drink. When they arrive, though, it becomes clear that he’s interested in only Ruby, to Nicole’s dismay. (It is not hard for her to command attention: She tends to wear very little clothing and bizarro baroque makeup with appliqué sequins.) The other two peace out, but when Ruby returns home later catatonic and blood-streaked having accidentally and extremely violently killed him as he tried to rape her they realize they shouldn’t have left her alone. Convinced the police won’t see it that way all men here are scum or scummier they join forces to dismember and dispose of the body, with increasingly farcical results.
That would be enough plot for most movies called “The Balconettes.” But Paul follows Élise around town after she disappears from their flat one day; turns out she’s unexpectedly pregnant. And Nicole sees Magnani’s ghost looking confused in his apartment. Turns out the mousy writer has maybe the least welcome sixth sense imaginable She sees dead people but only dead male abusers, which turns out to be a crowded spiritual realm as this movie barrels forward. This is the least successful thread in an overpacked narrative, but maximalism allows a movie like this one to whiff here and there without losing its rowdy mojo. Ditto its scattergun comedy, which ranges from perversely dark to just plain juvenile, a running joke about how stress makes Élise pass gas doesn’t land even once, although there are more than enough laughs here to keep things moving along nicely.
Still, “The Balconettes” is at its best when it stops and breathes and takes itself seriously for a minute like during that tight opening sequence or the hotel-room reconciliation between Élise and Paul that goes alarmingly south, illustrating the different forms sexual assault can take. The oppressive stickiness of the setting heightens the desperation of those moments. Evgenia Alexandrova’s roving camerawork always feels suitably sweaty and sunburnt, starting with a dizzying swoop across the various balconies of the residential avenue where this movie begins. It’s a shot that briefly teases a more disciplined film maybe one that takes a location-bound, “Rear Window”-style approach to things, offering up a mosaic of female crisis glimpsed through windows and balustrades. But Merlant isn’t interested in discipline, so discipline is not on the menu.
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