Tina Kakadelis
Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes comes from a personal place. The film is a horror comedy about the violence inflicted upon women and the ghostly trauma that’s left behind. The Balconettes takes place during a heat wave in Marseille when three friends (Noémie Merlant, Sanda Codreanu, & Souheila Yacoub) are trying to stay cool. They catch the eye of a mysterious, beautiful neighbor (Lucas Bravo) across the street who invites the friends to his apartment. What happens behind the closed doors results in a bloody scene the next morning, and the three friends have to figure out where to go from here.
The Balconettes premiered as part of the Midnight Screenings section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and is now preparing for a theatrical release. Director, co-writer, and actor Noémie Merlant and actor Sanda Codreanu sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss how Merlant has grown in directing her sophomore feature, the power of observation, and the catharsis of gore.
Merlant’s feature directorial debut was 2021’s Mi Iubita Mon Amour, also starring Codreanu. In the years between her debut and The Balconettes, Merlant was writing what would become her second film. Codreanu had a front row seat to the development of the script, not only because she starred in Mi Iubita Mon Amour, but because the two have been friends for years. She’s the only cast member from Merlant’s debut returning for The Balconettes, and Codreanu has seen how Merlant’s voice as a director has grown.
“I think she changed as a director because she changed as a person in life,” Codreanu muses. “She was more stressed for The Balconettes because it was a big production for a French movie. It’s not very easy to work with people who you love because you don’t want to disappoint them. This movie was ideal for that because the shooting was very fast. We didn’t have much time or money to do it. We didn’t have time to think so much.”
While the shooting may have been quick, there were three months of preparation. Before that, Merlant, alongside Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Celine Sciamma, had spent four years working on the script. From the beginning, Merlant knew that The Balconettes would be a blend of genres that would mix comedy and gore, a sort of screwball revenge story with touches of the Japanese and Korean horror flicks that Merlant grew up watching.
“In a way, this is my first movie because it’s the first movie I made in a professional way with time and money,” Merlant explains. “Since the beginning, I knew I wanted to do a mix of genres, but with a huge amount of comedy. Why? Because first, we have a lot of comedy in our lives…”
“We have a lot of drama in our lives that we transform into comedy,” interrupts Codreanu with a smile.
“When I talked with the Association of Sexual Violence, they told me the victims use humor a lot to go through all this trauma. It’s very powerful. Comedy, when we are a victim, lets us take the power again,” explains Merlant. “We make fun of the predator and of the patriarchal society. It’s also a way to show victims don’t always have to be sad. It exists, of course, but we also are allowed to laugh. Most of the time, society believes the victims are just depressed inside their home and they don’t move.
“When we start to go out, laugh, and be in comedy, they don’t believe us anymore,” continues Merlant. “That’s why it was very, very important for me. It was not easy, of course, to mix all these genres. It’s like life, though. Sometimes it’s very intimate and sentimental. Life is a mix of a lot of genres. I wanted the film to be as close as what we go through.”
“In movies, men create movies where they are talking about rape, for instance, with a dramatic old tone. The violence of the scene,” Codreanu says. “For us, people are shocked, oh, my God, you did a comedy with this subject, you are so brave. Yes, because it is a part of our lives. We are not crying every day because we have to continue to live.”
The three friends at the center of The Balconettes all have jobs that involve some form of observation. Ruby is a camgirl, Nicole is a writer, and Élise is an actor. Ruby and Élise make a living from being looked at, from their ability to hold the attention of the viewer. Nicole is on the other side of things where she’s the one doing the watching and then turning it into a book. She projects her desires and hopes onto the people around her to craft her story. Merlant sees the jobs of all of these women as a means of exploring female desire.
“I wanted to make a movie about women’s desires, or absence of desires, because we’ve been told what we’re supposed to desire. We’ve been told that our desire is to make pleasure to others and to men most of the time,” describes Merlant. “It was interesting for me to have jobs that were about desire, or what I desire when I look, or the desire that exists if people look at me.”
Codreanu wanted to portray Nicole as someone who was thinking critically about the world around her, but then also turned that critique into something she shared with the rest of the world.
“It was very important to me to have a character who starts writing a romantic comedy with the stereotype of a woman who falls in love with a man she doesn’t know because he’s beautiful,” begins Codreanu. “Noémie wanted to invert that idea. To invert the objectification.
“It’s very funny because I realized a couple of months ago that men write women as beautiful in movies. At the end of the movie, he realizes that she’s not as beautiful. She’s a little bit smart, too,” continues Codreanu. “Nicole is in love with the neighbor because he’s beautiful. She’ll fantasize a lot of things in her head about him that aren’t true in the end. She realizes that he’s a shit and he was a very bad boy.
“I wanted to show that Nicole is writing the movie,” Merlant clarifies. “The book she’s writing is the movie. She wanted to have a love story. She wanted to write a romance, but she ended up dealing with a predator.”
The Balconettes has moments of comedy, but it’s also quite a messy little film. The three friends spend a portion of it covered in blood, and there’s an inherent cleansing nature to rolling around on the floor covered in bodily fluid.
“Especially because it was real blood,” jokes Codreanu.
“I love, love, love horror movies,” gushes Merlant. “I’m so different from that in real life, but because it’s a story, I found it cathartic. Most of the time in movies, it’s women who get killed, so I wanted to play with this opposition.”
“When we were doing it, it was both joyful and freeing, but also dramatic because it’s heavy,” Merlant goes on. “We all have trauma, all three girls who are in the movie. It was intense for us to be able to let all this violence that we received be exorcised. The movie was intense, even for the crew that was 90% feminine. It was intense for all of us.”
“In every interview with journalists, Noémie always says she’s very different from the movie, that she’s not a violent person, you know?” Codreanu asks. “When you observe a lot of male directors who direct horror movies or violent movies, not one of them says they’re different from the movies they made.”
“Some people take it seriously,” Merlant jumps in. “It’s a movie that plays with genre. People say, you kill all the men in the movie, how could you? I’m like, but it’s a movie! These characters kill predators and yes, there are a lot of predators, because the world is built like that.”
