«Les femmes au balcon»: Women show their breasts and their middle fingers

Anyone who spends too much time in the sun on these hot days might be able to relate to the experiences of the protagonists lounging on their balconies in Marseille in Noémie Merlant's second directorial work. In unbearable temperatures, three women on the verge of a nervous breakdown hallucinate themselves into a wild ride between erotic desire and bloodthirsty body horror.

It begins when Nicole, writing her first novel, falls for the handsome, mysterious man in the window across the hall. It continues when her roommate Ruby, who shows off her body as a camgirl, flirts with the same man. And it gains momentum when actress Élise crashes into his car while parking. That evening, the three friends are invited over to the guy's house, and suddenly he's dead on a pole, his severed penis in the women's hands. Freud would probably have chuckled. Whether it's all just the heat is irrelevant; the subconscious is crucial either way.

The action takes place largely on balconies and in an apartment complex decorated in such bright colors that at times, one might think one is watching a fruit salad rather than a film. Merlant's production, which became known for her role in Céline Sciamma's "Portrait de la jeune fille en feu" (who co-wrote the screenplay), has little to do with naturalistic cinema anyway.

Instead, "Les Femmes au Balcon" follows the false trail of an over-the-top comedy à la Almodóvar, only to transform into a feminist horror grotesque in response to classic backstreet movies like Hitchcock's "Rear Window." That sounds like a lot, and perhaps the exuberance is also the film's greatest weakness, which blasts at the "male gaze," sexism, male rhetoric, and so on with little subtlety, ultimately telling very little.

What matters to Merlant is the pure gesture and a certain uncompromising attitude. Nudity is casually shown in close-ups; there is farting and spitting. Queer desire is unleashed in masturbation on the metal back of a chair and in dipping the hands into soil. A remarkable scene at the gynecologist's office breaks with the taboo surrounding the female sex in cinema. The film sees itself as a primal feminist cry that defies conventional modes of representation.

Oblique camera angles show how the women gradually free themselves from the men's gaze. This happens most clearly in the case of Ruby, who suddenly finds herself sitting alone in front of her laptop camera. No one is in the chatroom; she can only tell herself what happened to her that night with her neighbor. The voyeurism, which is also present on the balconies, is twisted through a peculiar mixture of reversal of gaze and revealingness. Women show their breasts and their middle fingers. Nudity here is not for show; it is an expression of a physicality that belongs to the women themselves. At times it seems liberating, like a revenge film, at other times it seems shockingly adolescent and forced.

The hypersexualization quickly wears off, and one wonders whether the feminist statement against the voyeuristic gaze of men is truly helped when the leading actresses all conform to conventional cinematic beauty ideals. The film is at its most delightful when it playfully handles its statements, such as when Élise, played by Merlant herself, fakes a loud orgasm to scare away nosy neighbors while her friends dispose of the man's body.

"I actually wanted to write a love story," says aspiring author Nicole as she tinkers with the blood-stained corpse, thus likely expressing Merlant's motivation. Romance seems unimaginable; the relationship between the sexes is a relentless war. Watching this film, it's hard to believe that the romantic kiss was once one of the most expressive scenes in cinema. Today, things are different.

Films are increasingly seeing themselves as a dramatic shell for political discourse. In this case, this is expressed, among other things, in rather trite dialogues between raped women and dead men who refuse to acknowledge that they raped women and were murdered as a result. At least the film strikes a completely new tone for the #MeToo debates by emerging from the jumble of genres and perspectives something like a genuinely female perspective.