The Balconettes (2024) ‘Cinemania’ Movie Review: A Frantically Assertive Exercise in Feminist Horror-Comedy

With the exception of maybe Bruno Mars, it would be nearly impossible for any artist to sustain a healthy career with one foot forever planted in the 1980s. And so it came to pass that, after a decade of playful sex comedies, capped with his era-defining “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” that famed flamboyant ally Pedro Almodóvar would reluctantly move into the next decade with a more focused (by his standards, at least) direction. Where, oh where, will we get our goofy, uneven sex satires from now?

Enter salvation in 2024 from an unlikely source: Noémie Merlant, the French performer primarily known for her acting in the achingly somber “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” takes the reins—with the help of her “Portrait” director Céline Sciamma as co-writer—for “The Balconettes,” a fiery ode to the silliness of Almodóvar’s formative decade, with a distinctly modern take on female autonomy beneath the crushing bulk of patriarchal violence. While it isn’t a stretch to assume that Merlant—whose most famous works (“Portrait,” “Jumbo,” Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, 13th District”) exude a distinct air of new-age sexual liberation—would be adept at taking the Maestro of Melodrama’s mantle, few could anticipate just how gleefully absurd and pointedly perceptive she’d be willing to get.

As close as we’re ever likely to get to a modern-day “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” “The Balconettes” finds Merlant tackling, in addition to her roles as director and co-writer, one of the leading parts, rounding out the trio of titular friends cooped up together in a Southern France apartment in the midst of a scorching heat wave. Merlant’s Élise, the most erratic of the three, is joined by sexually open camgirl Ruby (Souheila Yacoub) and struggling author Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), who takes her inspiration from peeping at the new hunky neighbor Magnini (Lucas Bravo) living across the courtyard.

After establishing a flirtatious rapport with their new sculpted piece of eye candy, the ladies find themselves invited to his flat one night for an evening of drinks and playful debauchery. Eventually, Nicole and Élise, exhausted, head back while Ruby stays behind to indulge Magnini in his practice of “tastefully” photographing (usually nude) women. It isn’t until the next morning that Élise and Nicole discover that Ruby has returned, covered in blood and horribly shaken by whatever has just happened in the twilight hours of the night.

It takes a particularly deft hand to present the obvious implications—soon outright confirmations—of such a setup, let alone doing so with the additional ambition of a comedic spin, but Merlant and Sciamma find their stride almost immediately through the respect and empathy they find in these three women (and women as a whole). That “The Balconettes” opens with a Hitchcockian crane shot detailing a neighbor whacking her abusive husband over the head with a dustpan and promptly suffocating him with her rear, only for this woman to become little more than an infrequent side player, shows precisely how much Merlant immediately foregrounds the necessary tenacity of an entire gender ready and willing to fiercely protect themselves and each other.

Exacerbated by the frustrating weight of the boiling French sun, Merlant’s camera proves just as chaotically frenzied as the narrative it captures; gliding crane shots become docudrama-style crash-zooms, fluid establishing shots give way for stark, sweaty closeups, and through it all, the delirious layering of the constant arguments congeal into a hysteria that could easily prove insufferable in lesser hands. Fortunately, “The Balconettes” finds itself in the care of an artist who prioritizes the pathos layered just beneath the hectically decentered craft.

Imperfect as the film may be in its overall threading of these tonal needles (the ‘80s Almodóvar influence remains firm in this respect), “The Balconettes” still stuns in just how often it manages to balance them effectively at all. Most stunning is how Merlant achieves this volatile mixture of sexual release, gendered horror and fart-ready humor all within single shots of her actors’ faces; it takes an incredible amount of trust to hand your stars a script this tonally scattered, point a camera at their faces and tell them to illustrate utter terror and cartoonish bumbling all in one take, and Merlant proves entirely trusting towards Yacoub and Codreanu, and especially herself.

From Loony Tunes-ian pratfalls in pools of blood to a spitfire monologue about clitoral stimulation in a hardware store, “The Balconettes” dives head-first into its provocation from all angles, proving to be an absolute firecracker of a sophomore directorial feature from its deceptively industrious co-star. And yet, with a project so nakedly (in more ways than one) boisterous, Noémie Merlant tosses all ego out the window and strips her feature down to its primal essence—an equal parts moving, amusing and unsettling tribute to solidarity amongst sisters.