When did it start? Who was first? Which of us is the zeroth case? We know that in primitive cultures matriarchy reigned, and fertility cults were common. The good fortune of the harvest depended on the graces of the goddesses, and consequently the well-being of the community. So why and at what point in history did what we are experiencing happen? A man chose dominion over a woman instead of dominion over himself. He raised his hand, and others followed. The order serving the community derailed.
Violence against women is a phenomenon today on a scale that is hard to imagine. Every ten minutes, a woman dies somewhere in the world at the hands of a partner or another person close to her. These are rarely intruders, most often people from the victim’s environment. Most situations of human rights violations concern women.
In the movie “Balkoniary” women take revenge on men
The opening scene of Noémie Merlant’s new film? A balcony, a fan, over forty degrees Celsius – a heat wave is sweeping through Marseille. A woman lies on the floor with a black eye and bruises on her body. She wakes up when her husband pours a bucket of water on her to stop her acting like she’s dead. She gets up, takes a spade, swings it and hits the thug in the base of the skull, blood splatters on the wall, but that’s not the end.
What differentiates characters in the movie The Balconies from historical precursors is the unprecedented directness of violence and technique they apply when handling the bodies of the attackers. Women’s revenge acts, after centuries of the treatment women have suffered, were, above all assassinations. There was little hope in hand-to-hand combat. Only by means of lies, plots, and poison could the oppressor be eliminated. And therefore the misogynistic fantasy dreamed that a woman would seduce and betray a man, get him drunk, kill him when he lay helpless.
As in the biblical story of Jael, who first gave him milk and wrapped him in a blanket, and when he relaxed his guard, drove a tent peg into the skull of the unsuspecting Sisera with a hammer. Judith cut off the head of Holofernes with a sword and stuffed it into a sack or basket. She threw it on the ground and, holding it by her foot, cast her eyes downwards with an innocent yet triumphal look, as Giorgione paints her.
Salome, with an excellent dance, ordered for the beheading of John the Baptist and proudly walked with it on a tray. Of course, decapitations were a metaphor for the fear of castration. The narrators were men. In the stories about the history of this or that kingdom, there were women hungry for power, who ordered the execution of their sons, grandsons, so that they themselves could take over the rule. There were many murderesses of men, all mythologized.
And “Kill Bill”? What actually happened most often had little to do with a bloody reckoning. As Anna Kowalczyk says in “The Missing Half of History. A Brief History of Women in Polish Lands”, for centuries the best recompense for a raped woman was marriage to her rapist. There could be no talk of consequences for the rapist either. Shame was enough; women had less than their name. Regaining honor by becoming the wife of the one who violated her body was considered the only way for a rape victim to return to the community. Living as the wife of the man who had violated you? It’s hard to imagine a greater nightmare.
No wonder, then, that women from the balcony are needed in the movie to settle scores for years of wrongs against generations that are still going on and those that have happened before us. I would translate the original French title “Les femmes au balcon” into the Polish “Balconettes” (in English “The Balconettes”) because an association of balconettes, a bra lifting breasts to make them look rounder, is very apt here.
Sneaking glances at people’s breasts is one of the themes. And finally, walking naked top, colourful panties hanging on the lines. “Amazing, I have such a part of my body!” – one would like to shout when it is 45 degrees outside and men walk around without shirts. However, we have to cover ourselves from them, because they are animals, after all, driven by instinct – they cannot control themselves.
“Balkoniary” tries to shake up a world based on socially sanctioned violence
In such a hot atmosphere, we meet three friends who meet on a balcony. Why not on the couch, in the living room or in the kitchen – where romantic comedies usually take place? The balcony lies halfway between the private and the public. It reaches for intimacy, attracts curious glances.
How can you fall in love with someone you have never met, only seen through the window? Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) should ask the boy played by Olaf Lubaszenko in “A Short Film About Love” (1988). She seems as immature as he is. She lives the lives of others, believing in a romantic scenario. Only when she gives up on false innocence and discovers her purpose in life will she gain the capacity for love. She will stop being afraid of something that really affects her.
Ruby, a camgirl, knows well how to make money on someone’s voyeurism. She does not only perform, does not only perform a continuous spectacle without any break – she cannot take off her “office uniform” or wash off her make-up, because her fans are constantly hungry for content. She loves pleasing people, listening to them, soothing them. Her role is in a sense caring.
She is governed by the principle of pleasure, freed like very few, but something in her must crack so she starts seeing herself from inside-out- not only from the point of view of men. She is acted quite vividly by Souheila Yacoub known for “Margot and Alma”. She is impressive with a range of colours like a parrot and constant anxiety presented through dance.
The last member of the trio – Elise – is played by Noémie Merlant, both the director of the film and its co-screenwriter together with Céline Sciamma, the author of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019), “Little Mommy” (2021) and the screenplay for “Paris, 13th Arrondissement” (2021). The experienced friend helped the leading actress of her most famous film make her directorial debut.
Merlant also mentions it, reporting as Elise that she is preparing to work on her first feature film, where she will play the muse of a famous painter. And she played a painter in a relationship that emancipates the muse. The character of Elise therefore has a self-referential function in the film, mocking the stereotypical situation of an actress trapped in the roles she plays. Unable to cope with reality, subject to constant manipulation by people on whom her fate depends. We meet her as she arrives straight from the set in Marilyn Monroe’s make-up.
She behaves as if she’s running away. She barely parks her red SUV, drawing other cars, and already in a red dress she’s crawling on all fours up the stairs with red carpet. She doesn’t feel well. The girls charge each other with positive energy and on a wave of enthusiasm and drunkenness go to their neighbor across the street (Lucas Bravo), who seduces them and throws a spontaneous party.
The heroines become transformed into animals of power: a puma, a condor, and a viper. What will follow turns the myth of female revenge upside down. The patron of the friends’ mission will be Lilith – a pure force of destruction, a nihilistic ruler of darkness, for only in this way could a world based on socially sanctioned violence be shaken. Lilith is a legendary woman who scorned the grace of God, whom she left in paradise. She became a creator of demons. She is, at times, the very archetype of a vampire-attractive and deceitful. Thanks to her, the heroines of the film can do any brutal things they want. They are guided by the goal of changing the balance in nature.
Of the three animals of power, the most important becomes the snake – Bothrops atrox, or the lanceolate lizard – a symbol of a degraded goddess tattooed on Ruby’s back, representing the cycle of death and rebirth, the painful shedding of skin. He alone has the energy and spirit to go underground and restore what’s lost harmony. Change comes from him. The puma appears when self-determination is required – to fight for the right of equality and freedom. When it’s necessary to enter the skies of the novel, diving into the piece, condor appears.
“The Balcony” blends together genres like comedy and body horror but for them, this mashup does not work
pity. During the adventures of great woman in the plot, about how the neighbor killed her husband with a shovel are abandoned. The witty, great character of Denise played Nadège Beausson Diagne is cut. Though he comes back like some zombie, not having his wife at home. Unduly, men the masters of violence become larger compared to the victims toward the end of the movie as they occupy more space of the movie.
The creators also can’t decide whether they want comedy or horror more. The tone of the film changes too often to make you care about the fates of the characters. After all, it’s all just a joke, so any potential revolution is also devoid of weight. Deeper reflections are thrown in passing, like the one that we fall in love with someone’s freedom in order to enslave them.
That the decision to have a child is made independently by a woman, even with a husband. That nobody and nothing can tell us something. Suddenly, as an act of revenge on a man, recommendations are provided on how to give sexual pleasure to a woman. Abortion is intertwined with masturbation. Drugged chicks are immersed in euphoria. It’s no longer clear what this liberation is all about.
In the background of the genre scenes, news about fires, an ecological disaster, of which the patriarchy is supposed to be a part, is broadcast. “Paul the Kitty” keeps calling, and the camgirl’s followers write in the comments that the sponsored star is not trying hard enough in front of the screen. Violence tightens the noose.
In the scenography consisting mainly of drying fancy underwear, stereotypically girlish ornaments look grotesque: moans of orgasms, lipstick inscriptions on the mirror, constant flirting, getting horny for a guy with a six-pack in only boxers, colorful drinks, sequins, fancy clothes – the whole cultural leash on which women are held. Show me an ordinary female person! Unfortunately, Denise is not at home.
At this point, we need to ask ourselves why we love French comedies? Colors, flavors, music, sex, and the beauty of women and men play a huge role in this cinema, especially in its entertainment version. Noémie Merlant wants to attract the audience to the screens with typical French magnets, and suddenly from a light mist she sticks out the barrel of a gun. She shoots blindly. A serious idea does not hold up behind the genre mishmash: zombies, body horror and sexual revelations.
This film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and the debate was heated. Judith Godrèche was speaking through the voices of thousands of women gathered in a Parisian street in a joint action to admit that they had been victims of male violence as she presented her film “Moi aussi (Me too)” at Un Certain Regard. The director’s 14-year-old daughter danced around them.
Most of them were around that age when they were violated by adults. Godrèche herself is in the middle of two lawsuits against two directors – accusing Jacques Doillon of rape on the set of the film “La Fille de 15 ans” (1989), in which she starred, and Benoît Jacquot of rape and abuse as part of their six-year relationship, which began when she was 14 and he was 39. Both men deny the accusations, but the investigation is ongoing.
Alongside that production, which faced the matter of abuse head-on, “The Balconies” was welcomed in Cannes. It was understood, indeed, that someone intended to achieve the same intention, but in a lesser, yet attractive manner than with the aggressive approach by the angry and socially alert public. The entertainment scope of the production would under no circumstances be an inhibitive factor.
References to the early cinema of Pedro Almodóvar may lead to liberating perversions, and to echoes of Gaspar Noé’s “Climax” (2018), an erotic dance horror starring Souheila Yacoub. Is it really so? And are such films now? Regardless, Merlant didn’t demonstrate directorial talents, which would have made it possible for her to face such a complicated challenge. And it does not matter so much whether it was her fault that she played one of the main roles in her own film again.
In a moment we will see her in the feminist “Emmanuelle” directed by Audrey Diwan (Golden Lion in Venice for “It Happened” in 2021), maybe there her protest will prove liberating.
Meanwhile, in the court in Avignon, the trial of Gisele Pelicot is coming to an end – a woman raped for a decade by her husband and dozens of other men in her own home. If you saw the event in a film, it would seem unbelievable, almost impossible for it to have actually happened. And yet the maximum sentence that the husband, the 71-year-old perpetrator, can receive is a trivial 20 years in prison.
Will this personal nightmare, which has been living not only in France but also the whole world since September, lead to changes in the law and medical care for people who may not even be aware that they are being violated under the influence of drugs? As this extremely courageous woman Gisele Pelicot wrote in a statement: “It is time to change the patriarchal ‘macho’ society that trivializes rape.
It is time for us to change the way we perceive rape.” When asked if she would like to keep her husband’s surname, she replied that at the beginning of the case, her children were ashamed of their surname. She has become famous all over the world, and she wants her grandchildren to be proud of her. To regain her honor. That is not something to be ashamed of.