{"id":47797,"date":"2025-05-20T18:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T22:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=47797"},"modified":"2025-05-20T13:16:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T17:16:16","slug":"the-balconettes-siff2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/20\/the-balconettes-siff2025\/","title":{"rendered":"THE BALCONETTES [SIFF2025]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In a heatwave in seaside Marseille, three roommates are forced to confront their lives after an incident in No\u00e9mie Merlant\u2019s dark comedy The Balconettes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Film content warning of sexual assault.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Three women share an apartment in Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast of France. It\u2019s summer. It\u2019s hot. It\u2019s hot. It\u2019s HOT. When the weather gets hot, with little respite from the increasing heat, tensions and desperation increase, especially in a film where big moments lead to dramatic outcomes. The Balconettes, or Les Femmes au Balcon in the native French, No\u00e9mie Merlant’s second film as a director has a solid base in the dark comedy, but doesn\u2019t fully come together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The three women couldn\u2019t be more different, allowing a strong interplay between the personalities. Writer-director No\u00e9mie Merlant, most known stateside for Portrait of a Lady on Fire and T\u00e1r, is Elise, a high-strung actress, having trouble with the demands of a new role and her husband. Ruby is a cam girl, sexually free, often topless; generally wild and anything goes. She\u2019s played Souhelia Yacoub, recently seen as Chani\u2019s sounding board friend in Dune: Part II, who carries a hidden hurt.\u00a0 Holding them all together is the grounded Nicole, played by Sandra Codreanu; an author, she\u2019s stuck getting her ideas onto the page, also put upon trying to be the good friend to the other two. The trio is all well-performed with an intense chemistry. All three are the precipice of change, of moving to another act in their lives, but are held back by internal and external issues.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What more is needed to make that push to the next stage than the disposal of a body? What a fine bonding and reconsideration of one\u2019s life moment! One day, Ruby returns home in a daze, covered with blood. Something bad has happened to her, and whatever else is going on for the three must pause to deal with the trouble. Dark comedy based around normal people stuck with the results of violence, how to clean it, get rid of it, and get away is a favorite set-up of mine. How a film chooses to go about it is the fun and the turn of plot, especially the screws turn and tensions rise.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish I had liked Balconettes more than I did. It\u2019s good, more than good, but doesn\u2019t come together fully.\u00a0 The script has an often frustrating looseness. One expects the situation to build, tensions to increase, and the characters to come more together, but with their journeys, it unravels. I\u2019m not dining the film for breaking the mold, but how it feels when it does. We all process a situation in our ways, but the inciting incident is almost just one thing in their lives. Ideas are all over the film that don\u2019t return, despite feeling important in the moment, such as the violent domestic moment that opens the film; after the sequence, the characters involved vanish from the film.<\/span><\/p>\n

I get it. It is just one thing in their lives, but something that would be larger, in real life and movies. The dark farce around the body is one of the highlights of how awful men can be, the artificialities they put on women, and women use to please even against their will. This is very much the point. Scared from a previous encounter, Ruby has a cam show, which can be seen as exploitative, reducing her to a body (an idea doubled by a male photographer character). Nicole\u2019s advisors whittle away her voice in their criticisms of her writing. Elise is first seen in a Marilyn Monroe get-up, reflecting the artificial nature of Monroe\u2019s public self (makes me want to watch Some Like it Hot, a film all about self-presentation), and has other off-putting and degrading situations to deal with, such as the stark sterility of a doctor\u2019s visit.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m for that concept and the exploration. But Merlant\u2019s script, co-written with C\u00e9lene Sciamma and Pauline Munier, is scattershot in its exploration. It is interesting how each of the three deals with the aftermath of the blood; Nicole\u2019s is the most pointed, perhaps a bit on the nose. Outside of just having more people outside, the ramifications of the heat wave don\u2019t factor much. A tightening of the script, pulling character and plot threads together, would lead to a stronger film. It\u2019s all there, just all over.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Merlant\u2019s direction is solid, though. The chemistry between the cast is palpable. It all moves with a bouncy energy. This is especially in the start, an opening Rear Window-inspired tracking shot is a highlight. The shot choices and flow are very well designed, and each of the three is given their own style for their portions. It\u2019s technically solid. Merlant and team have a superb technical know-how.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Balconettes is a solid film, well worth your time. An amazing sense of space and character, with great performances, drives the film over some bumpy plotting. It has a lot of important things to say, and I appreciate the messages, but the overall film is a little loose and messy.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The Balconettes is presented through the Seattle International Film Festival, running in-person screenings May 15th \u2013 25th and selected online screenings March 26th \u2013 June 1st. See <\/b>Siff.net\/festival<\/b><\/a>\u00a0for more.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a heatwave in seaside Marseille, three roommates are forced to confront their lives after an incident in No\u00e9mie Merlant\u2019s dark comedy The Balconettes.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1284],"tags":[259,356,3700],"class_list":["post-47797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-festivalsevents","tag-dark-comedy","tag-film-festival","tag-siff2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47799,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47797\/revisions\/47799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}