The Balconettes Is a Frustrating Feminist Revenge Comedy

During a heatwave in Marseille, housewife Denise (Nadège Beausson-Diagne) has had enough of her abusive husband. After he has beaten her and demands she get up to continue her housework, she cracks him over the head with a dustpan and watches as his blood splatters across a crucifix hung on the wall. Deciding she has had enough of his oppressive tyranny, she suffocates him by sitting on his face, finally breathing a sigh of relief when he takes his last breath. This opening scene captures the essence of The Balconettes, Noémie Merlant’s darkly comedic horror that follows three women as they attempt to return to normality after a traumatic encounter with a man who lives in the apartment across the road.

The film introduces its main characters with a certain lightness. There’s Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), a bold, free-loving camgirl whose first scene involves her rushing two paramours out of her room before anyone can discover them; Élise (Merlant), an actress who is hiding from her demanding husband, dressed in a glamorous red gown and blonde Marilyn Monroe-eque wig, captured in a dimly lit foyer with a sliver of light across her face like a caricature of a femme fatale; and finally Nicole (Sanda Condreanu), a writer working on her first novel who spends much of her time ogling—and finding inspiration in—a mysterious man (Lucas Bravo) who lives opposite her balcony. When a minor fender bender leads to them being invited to the man’s apartment, the women expect a night of frivolity, but instead are left with a dead body, a bloody crime scene, and the scars of a night that will never be forgotten.

The Balconettes is Merlant’s sophomore feature and was co-written with close friend Céline Sciamma, who directed Merlant in the highly acclaimed 2019 historical drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire. On the whole, for a filmmaker at the start of her career, The Balconettes is a rather impressive display of Merlant’s talents. It balances its more serious subject matter with dark humor to navigate a modern world where it feels as though women are more at risk than ever before, and it does so with stylistic flair. The camera often floats around, the green and yellow haze of Nicole’s apartment and blurred edges of the frame making each dizzy sequence feel like a hallucination. As the women stumble through the apartment, so too do we, following in their dazed footsteps from room to room as they process the traumatic events of the night before and battle with the extreme, oppressive temperatures of the heatwave.

As a film about how three women handle the aftermath of an encounter with a predatory man, The Balconettes couldn’t be more relevant. While the French Pélicot trial—a trial where 71-year-old Dominique Pélicot and a gang of 72 other men were discovered to have drugged and raped Pélicot’s wife over a nine year period—dominates newsrooms, one can’t help but link the complex feelings of anger explored in this film back to the current rise in cases of violence against women worldwide. In the film, the neighbor from across the street is only killed after Ruby relays a prophecy once bestowed upon her that the world will become “more fair,” making clear that his death is seen as a just punishment.

After the women have done their best to erase any trace of their crime, Nicole is haunted by her neighbor’s ghost, followed closely by visions of other abusive men who have been murdered as retribution by their victims. Nicole being able to see these men could be a heatwave-induced delusion, but it could just as well be the result of trauma; the trauma of witnessing a dead body, of course, but also the trauma of being a woman who has encountered harassment and can therefore understand why someone would be driven to such violence to defend themselves. Too often the onus is placed on women to forgive and forget after instances of horrific violence, and Nicole being haunted by these ghosts speaks to the guilt that women are often burdened with in the aftermath of assault. But the film refuses to cave to such guilt, instead asserting that if Nicole can see these men, it is because they have been killed for a reason and that their deaths restore balance in the world.

In many ways, The Balconettes is about the relief found in freedom from the violence of a patriarchal world. Relief is captured in a close up of Denise smiling after killing her abusive husband, through the look on Élise’s face when she walks away from her own oppressive husband, and by the relaxing of Nicole’s shoulders when the ghost of her murdered neighbor finally admits to the violence he inflicted on Ruby in the moments leading up to his death. His murder isn’t a random act of violence, but rather an act of self defense against a rapist, and although the women certainly don’t delight in it, there is a sense of relief that comes with knowing that they are free of this man. As Nicole writes in her story, after all is said and done the women can finally breathe, “imagining themselves free.”

But despite the film’s obvious feminist perspective, there’s an underlying issue in the way women are captured on screen. It must be noted that the only woman to be explicitly punished for her actions is Denise, who also happens to be one of the only Black characters in the film—perhaps the film could’ve been improved by an exploration into why white women are afforded freedom and safety where Black women are not. And although the film is captured through a female lens, men’s bodies are never ogled in the way women are. The camera often lingers on specific parts of a female character’s body–their legs, their open mouths, their bare breasts. It’s almost as though the audience is being forced to look at these women the way the men of the film do, but the men are never disembodied by the lens in a similar way. These shots, scattered throughout the film, can often feel gratuitous and make for rather jarring intrusions into what is otherwise a timely feminist revenge comedy.

The Balconettes works best in its comedic moments, in the scenes where Merlant finds levity amongst the grave reality of gendered violence. It’s tempting to write off the final moments of this film as sentimental, but at a time when sexual violence against women is at the forefront of public consciousness I find myself willing to overlook the desire for neat conclusions and simple answers. As The Balconettes affirms through the strength of its central friendship, though women have no control over whether or not men will take accountability for their harmful actions, there is still freedom to be found in the relationships we build amongst each other in the face of a patriarchal society. Rocky in places but buoyed by excellent lead performances, The Balconettes is a revenge thriller tailor-made for our moment.