The Balconettes

by Mike McGranaghan

We already know Noémie Merlant is a gifted actress. Turns out she’s a pretty good director, too. The French star of Jumbo and Baby Ruby works both sides of the camera in The Balconettes, from a screenplay she developed in collaboration with her Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma. Categorically, you could call it a horror-comedy, although the film still has big ideas on its mind.

The story centers around three friends: Plain-Jane writer Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), sexually liberated camgirl Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), and unhappily married actress Elise (Merlant). They spend an evening in Nicole’s apartment, flirting shamelessly with Magnani (Lucas Bravo), the handsome photographer across the street whom Nicole has secretly been lusting after. He flirts back, and before long, the women are in his apartment. He ends up dead – the details of which are intentionally left mysterious for a while – and the ladies attempt to dispose of the corpse without anyone, especially the police, finding out.

That general premise has been used before in movies like Very Bad Things and Rough Night. Merlant distinguishes her work from the pack by allowing it to have an unrestrained energy. The Balconettes is being released in America unrated. Had it been given an MPA rating, it surely would have been NC-17. There’s a lot of everything in here, including graphic sex scenes, gory images, and every sort of nudity you can imagine. That quality ups the impact of the “horror” (quotation marks because it’s situational horror, not jump scare horror) and the hilarity of the humor. From minute to minute, it’s impossible to guess where the plot is going to take you. You just know that wherever it is, it’s going to be wild.

This is, after all, a film where two women simultaneously use the arms of a rocking chair to masturbate. There’s a running gag about a severed penis, too. What one character does with it left me in stitches. The actresses establish a fun, playful chemistry together, making the outrageousness feel natural rather than shocking for its own sake. Balancing the comedic beats with the more serious ones takes a deft touch, which the trio certainly has. Watching their characters panic is alternately funny and uncomfortable.

For all the insane mayhem taking place, the movie has something worthwhile to say. Ultimately, this is a feminist tale about how there are many men who place their own sexual satisfaction above their female partner’s. Nicole, Ruby, and Elise have each found themselves devalued by a man. The events of the story find them becoming empowered to stand up for themselves, to take control of their own narrative. None of them are the same at the end as they were at the beginning.

A recurring bit about Nicole seeing and talking to ghosts doesn’t work but that constitutes a very short amount of the running time. The Balconettes is overall a twisted treat that induces laughter, gasps of disbelief, and thoughtful reflection. Noémie Merlant has made a real winner.

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