The Balconettes

The news that Noémie Merlant and her Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma wrote a script together may have made arthouse fans’ hearts leap for joy, but the actress’s second step behind the camera couldn’t be more different from the meditative historical drama that launched her career.

Despite tackling issues of #MeToo, which the director credits for having inspired the film, The Balconettes is a downright feral conglomerate of slapstick, toilet humour and horror elements, whose only real raison d’être is to show its audience a good time.

The plot centres around three young women (Merlant, Dune: Part Two’s Souheila Yacoub, Sanda Codreanu), who spend a sweltering summer’s day on the balcony of their flat. In the building across the street, an attractive stranger catches their eye, but when he invites them over for drinks, disaster starts to take its course.

The French production starts off with an amazingly sophisticated crane-shot opening sequence introducing various characters on their respective windowsills or balconies, before foreshadowing the core motif of the story. The supposed empowerment of the depicted acts, however, ring false, as the Black neighbour is led off in handcuffs, while the protagonists get a questionable victory march. As the tone of the film wouldn’t allow for this to be a deliberate nod to the racial inequality of the legal system, this blundering oversight reveals the neoliberal white idea of feminism that informs The Balconettes’s idea of emancipation, dampening any real impact it could have had.

The continuous taking of turns between genres and subsequently incoherent character arcs make this project seem like a case of eyes being bigger than the belly: the proverbial plate is full of half-bitten story items, none of which are ever fully digested. In a similarly cluttered manner, the movie references scenes from Rear Window, When Harry Met Sally… and Death Proof, almost as if Merlant leapt at the chance to re-enact some of her favourite scenes of film history, without giving too much thought to whether it would add anything of value to her own work.

All in all, there is little harm in tuning in to The Balconettes if one is looking for mindless entertainment, but it is important to leave expectations of any real contribution to feminist cinema at the door.

Selina Sondermann

The Balconettes does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.