LE MONDE'S OPINION - WHY NOT

From Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu (2019) and Emmanuelle (2024), Noémie Merlant has leveraged the intensity of her acting to support post-#MeToo fiction – a veritable sub-genre of French cinema where the liberation of women's voices would find its cinematic translation here, and each film, like a performance laboratory, would attempt to deprogram brains that have been too long exposed to a version of male-female relations mainly orchestrated by men.

Merlant has set the same program for her second feature film Les Femmes au Balcon, co-written with Céline Sciamma. It opens on a Hitchcockian note. In the middle of a heatwave, a long sequence shot sweeps across the lively facade of a Marseille building, before zooming in on an apartment where the three protagonists live in cheerful, colorful chaos. Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) is an aspiring writer struggling to complete her first novel; Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), is a smartass camgirl of unbridled sexuality, and Elise (Noémie Merlant), an actor, who's in a toxic relationship with a lawyer and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

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