After Iinabouti Mi iubita, my love, Noémie Merlant returns behind the camera to deliver us a comedy tinted with horror already passed by the box Festival de Cannes : Women on the balcony. Hilarant, powerfully feminist and ultra energetic, this is a very beautiful proposition from this beginning of GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival)!
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Elise (Noemia Merlant), Ruby (Souheila Yacoub) and Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) are three buddies living together in a Marseille apartment. While a suffocating heat crushes the Phocean city, they take full advantage of their balcony and soon notice a new neighbor (Lucas Bravo), which tends to definitely hardly dress. This voyeuristic thrill will quickly become concrete when the young man invites them home. Yet, everything will quickly derail...
What a pleasure to find Noémie Merlant, after the (very expected) Emmanuelle. Declining, both formally and on its merits, the new adaptationAudrey Diwan had nothing to convince. For Women on the balcony, Merlant takes on a less central role, but (re)steps behind the camera for his second film as a director after the imperfect Mi Iubita, my love in 2021. It was a sort of Mektoub, my love in Romania which – if the project were to drink – already carried in it the seeds of what will be Women on the balcony : a solar cinema, feminine, feminist and perfectly free.
Heatwave films
You probably don't remember Te l'avevo detto, the great Italian film screened last year at the GIFF and which was (very) unfortunately not released in theaters in France. And yet, it's the same assailant summer atmosphere that blew into the theatre of the Pitoëff Theatre during the screening of the feature film of Noemia Merlant. The impression, again, to attend a new form of cinema, infused with contemporary themes, resolutely modern, ultra-inventive and free.
And freedom is a question in Women on the balcony. By drawing the portrait of these three chicks (one actress, the other cameragirl, the third wannabe writer), Merlant draws the contours of a new generation of women who require, to represent them, a new way of doing cinema. This one stands at the edge of several genres (comedy, horror, drama), but does not kiss them with a bit of lips: Women on the balcony Go straight! The film allows for frontal nudity, many sexual themes but also (and above all) well-sharp incursions into the gore for both hilarious and disgusting segments.
Worn by a trio of simply perfect actors, comedy is never superfluous. It digs – deeply – the question of sexual violence, from several angles, and reports from within the passions, anxieties, bruises, but also the fantasies and impulses of the female. Multiplication of genres adapted to a plurality of messages, without it ever becoming either leading or scouring. And the film to close in a final as enjoyable as surprising: a rereading of Freedom guiding the people Feminist version, certainly liberating, but which will also and above all make laugh and reflect. Not to be missed!
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