Here to prove that “actor project” movies are always the ones with the dodgiest acting is the otherwise estimable French star Noémie Merlant who presents her writing-directing debut in Cannes, with herself in a leading role and Céline Sciamma on board as producer and credited as script collaborator. It’s got some funny moments and there’s a great scene in a gynaecologist’s treatment room whose calm, straightforward candour completely annihilates all those other coyly shot gynaecologist scenes you’ve ever seen in any movie or TV drama. And the opening sequence is very dramatic, centring on a woman whose story is sadly neglected for the rest of the film in favour of the younger, prettier people.
But I have to say that the film is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and self-admiring with a certain tiring kind of performer narcissism, always tending towards a jangling tone of celebratory affirmation which can’t absorb or do justice to the themes of misogyny and sexual violence that this film winds up being about. The cod-thriller scenes of corpse disposal do not convince on a realist level (though given that these corpses keep coming back as unfunny ghosts, a realist level is not needed) and do not work as comedy either.
The “balconettes” of the title are three neighbours and friends in flats in a courtyard in Marseille; during one endless hot summer in the city they hang out on each other’s balconies to escape the sweltering heat. They are online sex worker Ruby (Souheilia Yacoub), aspiring novelist Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) and Elise, an actor, played by Merlant herself, who sweeps into the action a little late having just finished a film shoot where she’s playing Marilyn Monroe. Elise actually stays in the ironic-glam-blond Marilyn persona for quite a while, supposedly because she forgot she still had the wig on. (That is surely an atypical occurrence at the end of a hard day’s filming.)
All three of them, and especially Ruby, are thirsting for a hot guy (Lucas Bravo) they can see through his balcony window in the apartment opposite, a top fashion photographer who’s always lounging around with his shirt off. He invites all three round to his apartment for drinks one night, and things spiral out of control.
The performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end. Merlant certainly keeps the energy levels high and the film barrels frantically along; it’s not exactly a vanity project but one that needed a stricter controlling presence.
• The Balconettes screened at the Cannes film festival.
