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.

​Seeing as my list of Star Wars films has spread wider than I anticipated (at least it hasn't broken the internet quite as badly as the Princess-Leia-has-a-PhD tweet...), and I’ve been asked lots of questions about methodology, here’s a brief overview of how I arrived at these figures. As with all research, it's been labour intensive and I've had to make some tricky and imperfect decisions, especially as I'm trying to create quantitative data from qualitative. Here's the logic behind it, which forms just one aspect of my research project. 
 
First off, I want to make clear that these are based on rough cuts of the remastered original trilogy, and prequels, sequels and spin-offs (i.e. what Disney now call ‘canon’ – sorry, no Holiday Special or ewok movies). I’ve edited the men out of the films as much as possible (more on this in a moment) but there are still sequences that need refining and further edits, so, if anything, the percentages of women’s screen time will likely go down as I trim excess male dialogue and reaction shots for a final cut.
 
In my definition of ‘screen time’ for women I’ve tried to be as consistent as possible, although this is often challenging. I’ve only counted women with speaking parts because having the ability to say something and contribute to the story, and not serving as a visual object, is important. However, if a woman with a speaking part is onscreen and not speaking, and neither is a man, I’ve kept the footage. Consequently, you get a lot of reaction shots of Leia or Jyn not doing much but being the only character in the frame. When men are speaking and a woman is onscreen, I’ve made a value judgement about whether she’s central to the action (or not) at that moment in the story. Sadly, especially in Padme’s case, she’s quite often just kind of ‘there’. She really does get a rough deal.
 
I have kept in as much footage as possible of planets, establishing shots and landscapes, as well as ships and battles (no, a ship does not count as female because humans have an annoying and sexist habit of gendering vehicles. A ship is a ship and it doesn’t have a gender. One day, let’s hope we all get to be more like ships). Initially I was going to cut a lot of the space dogfights because we know it’s men piloting the X-wings, etc. But by removing men from the rest of the films, it opens up the possibility that when we can’t see inside the vehicles there is a woman, non-binary or gender-neutral pilot. So, these sequences stayed. 

​I’ve also been asked a lot about droids and aliens. Almost every character in the Star Wars universe is gendered by the franchise. Threepio, Artoo and BB-8 are programmed ‘male.’ L3 is programmed ‘female.’ And, as L3 confirms for us in Solo, droids are sentient – hence droids can have genders (but the computer on the Falcon, which is not sentient, does not).
 
The wampa on Hoth is, apparently, male, so he goes in my cut. Mynocks, which are parasites and reproduce by splitting in two, could be gender neutral, so they stay. When animals appear in herds or packs containing two genders (for example, porgs and vulptex) I’ve left them in because there are limited hours in the day, life is short, and no, even I’m not nerdy enough to sit and work out which porgs have male or female eye-feathers. When in doubt about droids or aliens, I’ve referred to the Star Wars site, Wookieepedia, interviews with filmmakers, and evidence in the text such as gendered pronouns.
 
There are further things to be said about the quality of women’s representation in the films, which I’m addressing in an audiovideo essay and my book. For a start, while women’s screen time improves as the number of women’s speaking parts goes up, the films don’t necessarily get better over time—see the prequels—and even the sequels and spin-offs barely pass the Bechdel test because women characters often inhabit the screen with men. The notion that women can have meaningful conversations with one another about something other than male characters is most apparent in The Last Jedi… but you can still count these exchanges on one hand.
 
In future, I’ll be working on stats about the screen time for women of colour (my sense is that only the two sequels and Solo will produce significant results, and even these will be awfully low). My hope is that by telling you the odds of women being onscreen in Star Wars, we can keep having useful conversations about identity and representation in the franchise.