“An unbridled punk prank“, this is how Noémie Merlant describes her film THE Women on the balconyin theaters Wednesday 11 December, in which she deals, with delightful freedom, with strong themes that are particularly close to her heart : female intimacy, rape and its consequences, patriarchal oppression.
She plays (Élise) alongside Sanda Caudreanu (Nicole), who already appeared in her first feature film. My love mon amour, and Souheila Yacoub (Ruby).
The director Céline Sciamma, who revealed it in Portrait of the girl on fire (screenplay prize and Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019), contributed to the writing of the screenplay and is the executive producer of this (highly) anticipated film.
1 A female trio in a scorching Marseille
Élise, Nicole and Ruby are roommates in an apartment, which they share with their dog named Brad Pitt. An apartment located in the heart of Marseille, a city where the director lived for three years and with which she fell in love, to the point of making “the fourth character in the film“.
In the film, it’s summer, the mercury is rising, with a severe heatwave predicted. On the balcony, the trio’s eyes focus on the building opposite where a handsome hidalgo emerges who regularly parades at the window (Lucas Bravo, the seductive chef ofEmily in Paris).
The object of their fantasies soon invites them to come over for a drink. It turns out that he is a photographer, with a strong tropism for naked women… From there, the film shifts into the absurd, the thriller, the fantastic and bloody violence, which makes it a very feminist comedy. singular and deliciously crazy.
2 Experience as a starting point
Noémie Merlant was inspired by her experiences to write Women on the balconydotted according to her “anecdotes taken from reality“. “The rapes that the characters experience, I suffered them”she abruptly delivers in the press release.
It all started four years ago, during confinement. Feeling oppressed, suffocated, she suddenly left her companion and took refuge with friends, and in particular with the actress Sanda Caudreanu and her sisters. There, freed from the male gaze, she experienced a liberation, a great saving physical release.
To AFP, she speaks of a “liberating cocoon: we talked about our traumas, rapes, more or less severe attacks. Our bodies were free, between women, there were no sexualizing radars, no more diktats, our bodies relaxed, I wanted to film that.”
3Discovery of a saving sisterhood
“I lived in this sort of gynoecium for several months, it was a different life dynamic.” she confides in the press release. “I had never lived alone and never with women, and that did me a lot of good. There were a lot of discussions between us, about our dreams, our traumas, our desires, and then about the patriarchal oppression.”
A solidarity that is evident on the screen between the three female characters. “What comes through is a form of truth. We were in this sororal cohesion, on and off the set“, advances at the microphone of AFP Sanda Codreanu, who has known Noémie Merlant for more than fifteen ans.
Souheila Yacoub, new to the group, quickly found her place in the middle of the tandem. “I found a freedom of play that I hadn’t had for a long time“, testifies the person concerned.
4 Eclectic film inspirations
For her second feature film, the actress and director wanted to go to excess, with “a mixture of colors, textures, a generous and exuberant film, which borders on bad taste, vulgarity, while retaining humor“, she summarizes.
“In my references there are Boulevard of Death by Tarantino, Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown by Almodovar, some Korean films, but also Santa Claus is trash by Jean-Marie Poiré and Rear window d’Alfred Hitchcock”details Noémie Merlant in Madame Figaro from 6 December, of which she adorns the cover. A hell of a cocktail, which she clearly justifies.
“My subject is the liberation of my female characters. I could only do this with the mixture of genres which allows everything to be done”, she continues. “The absurd, the comedy, the gore. In this type of film, everything is allowed and I wanted to allow my characters everything.”
5 Humor and mixed violence in the form of catharsis
Noémie Merlant, who discovered cinema with the Asian horror films she watched as a child with her sister, imagined a comedy that does not shy away from gore. “I love horror films, it’s very cathartic,” she said to Madame Figaro. “There is an outlet that allows you to release all the violence accumulated within you.”
“There is gore, rage, violence, but they are in defense, not in revenge, they just want to stop the aggressors,” she analyzes at the AFP microphone. “I have never been angry or violent in my life, I put it in the film.”
In order to distance the sexualization of bodies“humor and satire are strong weapons“which she uses so skillfully to make people both laugh and think.”From cellulite problems, down to the mysterious and fantasy woman!“, she proclaims. “I like these colorful characters, very characterized women, who speak loudly. It’s almost caricature sometimes, comic book characters.“
6 A figure of Marilyn freed from the “male gaze”
In the film, Noémie Merlant aka Élise arrives wearing a blonde wig and a tight red Marilyn Monroe dress. “I wanted to have fun with the codes of male gaze,” she says in the press kit. “In my dreams, I see Marylin finding her friends, in a cocoon where she can save herself, be alive and little by little free herself from this absolute figure which prevents her from being herself. Marilyn exists only through male desire, she was shaped by him and for him. So it was fun and an outlet to play with that figure.”
What she’s trying to do here is “reverse perspectives, put ourselves in the other’s place, reclaim our stories, such as that of sexist and sexual violence. For example, it was a question of not showing the “spectacular” rape of Ruby and believing her character, but of instead filming the marital rape suffered by Élise, which is so little shown and so little understood.“
This film is also prohibited for children under 12 years because of this realistic scene of rape in a marital context. A scene as striking as this sentence spoken by the character of Élise : “We can only be ourselves between us“, which sums up the point of the film well, a crazy plea in favor of women’s aspiration to just be able to be themselves all the time.
