With “Women on the Balcony”, her second feature film as director, Noémie Merlant, the actress revealed by the film “Portrait of the Young Girl on Fire”, succeeds in a crazy and cheeky comedy, which goes a little in all directions but reaches its target: toxic and violent masculinity!
“We can only really be ourselves, right?” The question is asked by Élise, the character played by Noémie Merlant, an actress in the midst of an existential crisis, who fled the end of her Parisian shoot, along with her husband, to find her best friends, sharing a flat in Marseille: Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), flamboyant and unbridled cam girl, and Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), very slightly neurotic apprentice writer. It's summer, it's 46°C, a temperature that will scald your mind. While the trio is having fun losing her gently, in the joy of their newfound and uninhibited complicity, Élise, therefore, wonders. Of course the answer is in his question. And the evidence? In the image!
From the balcony where they are trying to cool off, the three girlfriends leer at the neighbor across the street, a dark, handsome guy who has the annoying tendency to walk around half naked; which has the gift of making Nicole crazy. More at ease, Ruby finds a way to get in touch with the hunk who invites all three of them to spend the evening at his place. The next day, it's more than a hangover that the trio will have to deal with: Ruby, who had lingered all night, returned covered in blood and in a state of shock. As for the boy… let's just say he was nailed a little more than the beak!
Initially, Women on the Balcony is like its heroines among themselves: sunny, funny, crazy, trivial, jubilant, sassy, backfiring… The influence of Pedro Almodovar is patent in pop aesthetics, while saturated colors and fluid movements, but also and above all in the sensual but never sexualized, raw but never vulgar way of considering femininity, of which each incarnation represents a different relationship to the body and the world.
When comedy turns to farce, it is Álex de la Iglesia that we think of (and in particular his films My Dear Neighbors and Le crime farpait). But Noémie Merlant unfortunately does not yet possess the virtuosity of the Basque filmmaker in the mad art of radical rupture of tone. It zigzags between macabre burlesque, zany thriller, social cartoon, humorous gore, horrific slapstick and fantastical fable, but slips here, stumbles there and even wallows (the ghost works average).
No problem, the actress and director goes there so willingly, without filter or modesty, that she takes everything in her path. Until our adhesion, in form because, in substance, she had it from the start and she keeps it until the end: her joyful ode to a saving and emancipating sorority, coupled with an angry shooting of the toxic and violent masculinity, comes at the right time and with a raised fist!
