The Balconettes: A jaw-droppingly outrageous murder-farce

When three neighbours flirt with a photographer, the consequences turn deadly in this shocking, ultra-gory comedy horror

4/5
There must be one bodily fluid which isn’t splashed around the screen at some point in Noémie Merlant’s new film, but I can’t say I could readily tell you what it might be. The 35-year-old actress’s second film as director is a soaringly outrageous murder-farce which at points had my jaw hanging so low I resembled a boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. 
In addition to directing and starring, Merlant co-wrote the script with Céline Sciamma, whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire gave the actress the role that would lift her to international attention in 2019. Their latest collaboration could be described as a portrait of three ladies on fire, though with no 18th-century Breton reserve to keep the flames in check.
The setting is Marseille, mid-heatwave, where two roommates swelter as the temperature climbs. Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) is an aspiring novelist, taking fruitless creative writing classes on Zoom, while Ruby (Dune: Part Two’s Souheila Yacoub) is a carefree cam girl, broadcasting raunch from her bedroom to her online male fans. Soon they’re joined by Élise (Merlant), an actress who needs a bed when her marriage hits the skids. 
The trio kill time by standing on their balcony and flirting long-distance with the mysterious and often shirtless male photographer (Lucas Bravo) who lives in a block across the road: this leads to a late-night invitation over for drinks, which the women excitedly accept. Hours later – though it’s not initially clear how, or why – the photographer is dead and impaled on his light stand, while his apartment resembles a Friday the 13th set with some ultra-gory details that might make even Jason Voorhees blanch.
Yet having set up this juicy mystery, the film doesn’t find its focus but spiders out madly in various directions. Naturally, there’s the clean-up and cover-up to attend to, which Merlant and her co-star play for grotesque laughs: what does one do with severed genitals? But then Élise’s toxic husband Paul (Christophe Montenez) also comes to town in an attempt to patch things up, and his various wheedlings and manipulations – including a bout of ‘make-up sex’ we realise with a lurch is in fact marital rape – serve as a grim, grounded counterpoint to the more obviously horrific goings-on elsewhere.
And just as the plot oversteps the acceptable limits of genre, so too do its heroines’ bodies refuse to be politely constrained. There is leaking. There is gushing. There is snorting. There is farting. And the last of these came as such a shock that at first I thought it must have been someone in the screening. But Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.
Screening at the London Film Festival A UK release has yet to be announced
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