Noémie Merlant’s second feature film “The Balconettes” is uneven at best and messy at worst. The movie tries really hard to balance itself among comedy, drama, thriller, and horror, but the overall result is often too jarring and incoherent to engage us more into the misadventure of its three different female main characters, and this is all the more disappointing considering this is another notable collaboration between Merlant and her co-writer Céline Sciamma after their superlative achievement in Sciamma’s 2019 film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”.

 The film, which is set in one neighborhood of Marseille, France in the middle of one particularly hot summer, seems promising during the opening sequence. As the camera of cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova dexterously looks here and there around two apartment buildings facing each other across a street, we cannot help but be reminded of the opening part of Alfred Hitchcock’s great thriller film “Rear Window” (1954), and this wonderful opening sequence eventually culminates to a sudden act of killing which occurs in the one of these two apartment buildings.

This incident is involved with a middle-aged woman who has been frequently abused by her husband, and she is also a close neighbor to Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), a young woman who has been living with her female roommate Ruby (Souheila Yacoub) in their mostly cozy apartment. While Nicole is your average aspiring writer still taking an online writing lesson, Ruby has earned her living via working as a webcam model, and she is not so shy about her body even when she is not working in her bedroom.

Anyway, Nicole has been trying to write a story about a shy woman attracted to a male stranger living in a nearby apartment building, and, not so surprisingly, the story is actually based on Nicole’s growing lust and attraction toward a certain handsome lad living in that apartment building right across the street from her apartment building. Whenever her writing process is not going that well, Nicole cannot help but pay more attention to this seemingly charming lad, and Ruby joins in her roommate’s ongoing infatuation with him as a young woman quite open-minded about sexual desire.

Anyway, things become a bit more interesting when Ruby and Nicole’s actress friend Élise, who is incidentally played by Merlant, comes to stay at their apartment. She recently ran away from everything including her husband right after the shooting of her another movie where she played Marylin Monroe, and she is certainly willing to have some fun along with her two friends as often lusting after that lad together.

And then there comes an unexpected chance for these three ladies not long after they contact him via online texting. He gladly invites all of them into his apartment during one evening, and the ladies find themselves flirting more with him once they enter his posh apartment. He turns out to be a professional photographer, and it seems that he is quite willing to put any of the ladies in front of his camera.

As many of you already expected, the situation subsequently becomes very, very, very serious for the ladies after they drink a lot with him and then Élise and Nicole inadvertently leave Ruby alone with him. Early in the next morning, Ruby returns, but she looks quite traumatized with a lot of blood on her body, and her two friends are certainly shocked and scared a lot as a result. After Ruby manages to pull herself together to some degree, they all go back to his apartment, and, what do you know, he died in a way which is not only very gruesome but also morbidly outrageous.

Instead of calling the police, the ladies decide to cover up the happening as much as possible. Of course, this turns out to be quite a difficult task for all of them, and the mood accordingly becomes very hysterical from time to time – especially when they cannot help but let out their mounting fear and panic at one point.

Around that narrative point, we are supposed to care more about its three female main characters, but Merlant and Sciamma’s screenplay fails to develop its broad comic characters into believable human figures to hold our attention, and it often seems to lose its way among its several different genre modes. While it surely wields a lot of black humor as following its three female main characters’ worsening plight, this is not mixed that well with its more serious parts including the one involved with Nicole’s suddenly acquired supernatural ability, and we consequently become more distant to the story and characters without much care or attention.

I must recognize that Merlant and her two fellow actresses do try their best for selling their rather superficial roles. Besides willingly throwing themselves into their character’s sexual aspects, they sometimes show fairly good comic chemistry among themselves on the screen, and you will wish they were in a better film hidden somewhere inside the movie.

On the whole, “The Balconettes” often distracted me for its weak characterization and lumpy storytelling during my viewing, and I am trying to accept that it is just a misfire in both Merlant and Sciamma’s careers. It is at least nice to see them trying something quite different from their previous film, but they could do better than this in my humble opinion, and I can only hope that they will soon bounce back as advancing in their respective movie careers as usual.