We sit, all six or seven of us, in a small theatre on a weekend afternoon during the festival’s busy press schedule. Mostly femme (we’re sitting to watch a film about women’s experiences, after all), but varied nevertheless by gender presentation, age, race, class. We sit there, with our differences, and cry together as women dance across the screen in defiance of laws dictating that they are hidden behind doors. Behind borders. Behind media blackouts.
 
My Stolen Planet comprises documentarian Farahnaz Sharifi’s private home videos—she says she’s been addicted to recording her daily life since attending film school—and the illicit super-8 footage that she buys to archive life before Khomeini assumed power in Iran. Born during the 1979 Revolution, she recalls growing up in two worlds: one inside her home, where dancing and music and laughter prevailed; and the other outside in public, where the authorities demanded that women be concealed beneath hijabs. A photo of seven-year-old Farah in her back garden, smiling with her hijab in hand, gestures to the two lives she has lived within and outside the wall. In contrast to the violent anti-American imagery that Farah’s more contemporary footage reveals in downtown Tehran, with skulls replacing stars and bodies piled up as if blasted by bombs, the hijab to her is a home-grown weapon. Each piece of fabric, she says, represents ‘all of their power to control all of our lives.’
 
Farah can, however, retreat into her world of films and filming. She shares her archived footage, a planet of unknown provenance where now exiled Iranian women look directly into cameras held by friends, family, and lovers and thus reveal themselves. ‘I buy people’s memories,’ she says, scanning every frame of the celluloid strips with care; more than that, they are the memories of a people, a community that is all but erased from that other, outside world. ​As she describes what life was like in Iran before the Revolution, she conjures the ghosts of women past into being. They laugh, smile, hold babies. Hang out of car windows, put their arms around one another. They dance and sing, and dance some more. The blue-green blush of degradation may colour the old film stock, yet still you can see the women dancing. And Farah dances, too, at every opportunity. Where there is music and dancing there is life, and Iranian women, her film tells us, have an abundance of it.

But their lives can too easily be taken away. For the poignant normalcy of the family home (where Farah’s mother sits at the kitchen table, learning to use her daughter’s phone camera) is just a glance away from the militarised and alien planet outside. It’s in this juxtaposition, in the shot-reverse shot set up that Farah uses to document women’s lives from different angles, that My Stolen Planet is so effective. The Instagram aesthetic afforded by the smart phone camera—its portrait orientation creating letter-box stripes of black down either side of the screen—when inside the house quickly transforms into the kind of amateur, think-on-your-feet bystander footage that we associate with rolling news coverage when the women go outside to join protests.

Selfies give way to surreptitious mobile shots taken on the run or from car windows in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death (killed by Iranian forces in 2022 for not wearing her hijab, the young Kurdish woman’s death sparked mass protests with the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’). Intimate footage of Farah in domestic spaces are swapped for FaceTime calls from her new home in Germany; My Stolen Planet is a reminder that mobile phones are lifelines between distant worlds for so many.

Amid so much violence, it’s hardly surprising that our small audience could not hold back tears. Rage, grief, and despair cannot be contained, and the women that Sharifi’s film give voice to are constrained by authoritarian rule, not a lack of will to be free. There is also that slight recognition, that odd moment of undeniable comparison, between what in the UK is called the Iranian ‘regime,’ and some of our own recent elected governments’ actions. Politicians’ efforts to undermine human rights (planning to deport people to Rwanda without consent), prevent protest (as per the Public Order Act 2023, or the targeting of pro-Palestinian figures), and wage ideological ‘culture wars’ against marginalised groups may not compare directly to the state-mandated violence felt by women in Iran – but they are distressing contextual experiences nonetheless.

Somehow, though—for me, at least—it’s not the violence that sparks the greatest emotional response. It’s the hope. It’s Farah’s friend declaring with optimism that ‘change is coming,’ and that they should continue ‘living life in beauty,’ a smile lighting up her face in the blue-white glow of the phone on a dark street at night. It's the beauty of Sharifi's filmmaking and the unwavering rhythm of the edit that insists their story is told. It’s the super-8 film that survives, moving those dancing women on and on and on through the ages. It’s the sitting-room karaoke, and the chants for freedom, and the always, always dancing, people’s bodies floating and twirling and liberated by defiance and abandon and joy, always moving, that reminded me that all of us, in whatever degree we feel the weight of authoritarianism, have life.

​It’s the voices of women singing in their homes and on the streets, their collective refusal reverberating between planets, their sound inescapable.

​It’s the living, in spite of it all.

London Film Festival, October 9, 2024

It’s eight years and barely a week since Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s article in The New York Times opened the floodgates on survivors’ stories of abuse in the film industry. Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, Ashley Judd, and Lupita Nyong’o were among scores of women who shared their experiences of gender-based violence; social media coverage turned Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement into an international phenomenon.
 
Following in the wake of those outpourings, The Balconettes offers catharsis, of sorts, by turning the tables on abusive men. Written by Noémie Merlant and Céline Sciamma, it’s Merlant’s directorial debut. I wanted to like it. I wanted to love it. But for all its stylish art direction and smart cinematography, it didn’t move me.
 
The film opens with a roving, restless camera traversing the open windows of a courtyard in Marseille. It’s an obvious reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), complete with dancer warming up on a balcony. The long take—panning, tilting, snaking—also recalls the Orson Welles classic A Touch of Evil (1954). There’s a brief interlude on one balcony as Denise, a Black working-class woman, murders her abusive husband (a troubling MacGuffin-esque device that seeks to acknowledge, but ultimately reinforces, misogynoir), before we meet the white, young, Balconettes. Tension builds as news readers broadcast reports of soaring temperatures, in a likely nod to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989).
 
Out on her balcony in the heat, the sexually frustrated and socially awkward Nicole gazes at the mysterious man who lives in the apartment across the road. She takes online writing classes, and is planning a novel about a woman who, in thinly disguised fiction, falls in love with a stranger on the balcony opposite her own. She explains the plot to housemate Ruby, a confident, polyamorous cam girl, who shimmers with metallic excess as she glides through the frame. The pair are joined unexpectedly by Elise, an actress escaping her overbearing husband. Playing the part of Marilyn Monroe (the 1955 heatwave comedy The Seven Year Itch springs to mind), Elise oozes femme-fatale Hollywood glamour until she strips off her wig and breaks wind. They're a compelling, if not always relatable, trio.
 
A chance encounter with Nicole’s balcony crush lead the three women to his apartment. His space is overshadowed by oversized photographs he’s taken of models, and a drunken Ruby agrees to let him photograph her to augment her online work.
 
All in a flash, life changes for the Balconettes. The photographer’s attempt to rape Ruby results in his death (a riff on Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom), and the women’s desperation to protect Ruby from the police. Cue some perfectly timed and always dark comedy involving a fake orgasm, refrigerators, a wheelie bin, and a stairwell sequence straight out of The Third Man (1949).
 
Troubling the women, though, are the ghosts of the photographer and—inexplicably—those of other rapists killed by their survivors, who, for reasons that remain unclear, congregate in the photographer’s apartment. Denying any wrongdoing (of course), the men want revenge.

There’s much to enjoy about the film. Souheila Yacoub’s performance as Ruby is perfect in its physical intensity. She snakes around the flat, wrapping everyone up in her insistent love for life, or coiling herself up in despair. Colour palettes are rich with green, purple, and red; fairy lights suffuse the sultry night air with a yellow glow. An erotically charged moment between Elise and Ruby reveals their sensuality as they entwine their fingers in soil. Nicole’s visit to the dead photographer’s flat reveals a darker, more peverse side to her character, and the meta-textual nature of her voiceover adds complexity to the narrative. Is this really happening, or are we watching the plot of her novel play out?
 
Aside from anything else it’s funny, even if you’ve encountered many of the jokes before. It cries out for watching with a group of friends. It's to be enjoyed by those who want to tear up the canon and laugh at the absurdity of abusive men. It’s a punchy, B-movie, Powerpuff Girls pastiche of a rape-revenge movie that let’s women do the talking – and chopping, sawing, and hauling, too. Owing to the abuse they encounter in hotel rooms, doctors’ surgeries, and the streets, it’s impossible not to root for the Balconettes. There’s a vital message here: you don’t have to like them to want them to win.
 
Yet for all that the film strives for poignancy in exchanges between Nicole and the photographer’s ghost, it failed to move me in that way that I hoped. With so much going on in the film’s 104 minute runtime (three assaults, two murders, a cover up, a ghost story, and an abortion) the action is relentless. The second instance of rape does not get acknowledged as such; it’s a major oversight in a film about holding abusers to account. Character arcs and subplots are underdeveloped. The hasty denouement makes little sense.
 
Speaking to Nicole about her novel, her patronising (older, white and male) writing tutor suggests that she cannot hope to be a revered author until she’s read the ‘greats’ of canon literature. In subverting so many classic films, The Balconettes sticks two fingers up to this idea. But while there’s a punk sensibility to Merlant’s references, the citations clutter an already busy film with contradiction – it ends up owing a debt to the canon, after all.
 
It’s like reading a student essay that spends that expends so much energy arguing with its source material that the writer’s own ideas are lost. Given that Merlant has important things to say, this is a real shame. If a second feature as director beckons, I hope it affords an opportunity to develop her voice and give her characters more time to breathe. And, of course, there must be justice for Denise.