In the heart of Marseille, between the walls of an apartment and the fragile boundary of a shared balcony, the drama of three women – Nicole, Ruby, and Elisa – unfolds. Bound by an unbreakable friendship, they rebel against the mute and deep-rooted violence of patriarchy. Their existence, suspended between laughter and pain, is a suffocated cry, an act of insurrection against a system that has forced them for centuries to embody a destiny written by male hands.

The opening image is a punch to the stomach: a woman lies on the floor, covered in bruises. A man walks out, looks at her with annoyance, and tells her to stop with the "scene." She is unconscious. He throws a bucket of water on her, impatient: he is hungry and wants her to make him dinner. In this dismissive and brutal gesture condenses the essence of a culture that, for centuries, has made the female body a possession, a function, a service. But something is shifting. The irreversible is about to unfold.

Merlant creates a suspended universe, immersed in a dimension of alienation and surrealism. With a masterful long take that spans the windows of two buildings, she forces us to become involuntary witnesses, silent voyeurs of a world that has always existed under our eyes but which we too often choose to ignore. Irony sneaks into the narrative like a sweet poison: the mixing of genres – comedy, thriller, grotesque – is not a stylistic game but a necessary language to subvert the canon and tell the trauma without victimhood, rebellion without rhetoric.

Nicole, Ruby, and Elisa are not just women: they are shattered archetypes, symbols of a femininity that has ceased to be a mystery to contemplate – because, after all, "the mystery of a woman is not a boast, but a punishment." Nicole writes, drawing from the lives of her friends, who are ever wilder than hers; Ruby claims her sexuality, proudly displaying her body, while Elisa tries to escape a love that has become a prison. They are flesh and blood, secretions and desire, pure generative force. Their body is not an object of seduction but a tool for expression, and their gaze is no longer that of the eternal muse, but that of someone who finally speaks and acts.

The episode of the impaled neighbor, exposed in all his ridiculous vulnerability, is a fierce reversal of male voyeurism: the man's body, stripped and objectified, becomes a grotesque caricature, a tragic echo of a virility that believes itself inviolable. The police officers, ridiculously hyper-masculine, help the protagonists hide the body, unaware that they are pawns in a game beyond their comprehension. And here, Merlant performs the most radical act: the male, until he admits his guilt, is a ghost, a shadow devoid of substance. His ignorance makes him superfluous, his dominion dissolves into the air like a failed illusion.

But the film does not merely denounce: its gaze plunges into the roots of cultural violence, where abortion becomes the liberation from a toxic relationship, and murder the only way out of the prison of patriarchy. The narrative offers no excuses nor redemption: rebellion is absolute, necessary, almost biological. It is the body itself that rebels, refusing the imposed passivity, rewriting the rules of the game.

Merlant, with a mastery that surprises in its lucidity and ferocity, emasculates the male body from the story and returns to femininity its subversive centrality. Yet, the film never becomes heavy with dogmatism: the tone remains light, mocking, even playful. Patriarchy is dismantled with a laugh, revenge is carried out between irony and sensuality. This is where its strength lies: violence is not just physical, but cultural, and this is the deepest wound, the one Merlant forces us to look at without filters.

The hypnotic cinematography of the film accompanies this narrative with a carnal sensitivity, enhancing the female body in its infinite nuances. Every frame is an act of liberation, a celebration of bodily expressiveness: the bodies reveal themselves without hesitation, playful and fluorescent, intimate and decorated, immersed in an aesthetic that does not fear nudity but elevates it to a subversive language. The body is no longer a territory to be conquered, but a universe to be explored, a temple of secretions and blood, an icon of its own freedom.

The Balconettes is not just a film about female freedom. It is a rite of passage, a political act, a declaration of war. And in the end, the body remains. A body that does not ask for permission to exist, that does not apologize for its pleasure, that is neither merchandise nor symbol, but pure life. A body that laughs, bleeds, kills, survives, reigns. And dances on the balcony, under the sun of Marseille, while the whole world watches and can no longer look away.

11-Mar-2025 by Beatrice