The Balcony

I admit that the movie is a little slow at times, but the plot and the circumstances, and the celebrities in this film are enough to make it worthwhile. The power struggle scene between Leonard Nimoy and Peter Falk seems to be almost homo-erotic. And seeing Shelley Winters kiss another woman. Too much! This movie is one of my favorites!

Quite a slow start (after the shocking opening credits), but if you can last until Peter Falk shows up then you will be rewarded. Particularly impressive how this movie fits with the late 60s questioning of authority, nationalism, and conventional morality. I would have sworn it was made in 68 or 69. At times it reminded me of "Zabriskie Point" and "If." Not a great movie on any level, but it has a number of intriguing ideas, some very good dialogue, and standout performances by Falk and Shelley Winters.

Directed by Joseph Strick, this 1963 movie is a heady mix of philosophy and psychology. The dialogue comes from the French playwright Jean Genet, and rises well above the literary merits of all but a few American films. Beyond its cerebral wordiness - which could well seem unintelligible, but could just as easily be found rewarding for its challenges - this film offers distinctive and remarkable observations on all manner of things, from identity & authority to violence, sex, & the will to power. The movie is largely shot in dark, eerie interiors, and it looks and feels stagebound: this is not necessarily a flaw. The stark & claustrophobic black & white frames help keep a simmering tension amid even the (darkly) humorous passages. The unconvincing "special effects", such as they are, should not be taken out of context: the occasional shots of the outside world are deliberately dreamlike & unrealistic. Redolent of the postwar avant-garde theater of Beckett and Ionescu, this is a surreal vision, and it's one worth exploring. (Shelley Winters performs a career-high bravura as the Madame, and the score is by Stravinsky.)

The transplanting of Genet's writing to film is odd indeed. It feels strongly allegorical, and it is: it's about a made-up revolution going on in the streets, violent scenes of apocalyptic fighting, where the two opposing forces, the police chief and the leader of the revolution, meet in a brothel where fetishistic sex scenes are enacted. So Genet's play seems at first to be about how sex binds, but it's more a post-modern sort of play, where all is an illusion and we play roles -- in Genet's world, our choices are governed by sex (which the film's comic ending uses to end the conflict through nakedness).

That's all well and good, but the revolutionary aspect doesn't come together too well, because the mocking of people who believe anyone who's presented to them isn't really successful; it's told more than it's dramatized. (Three joes from the brothel who act out their fetish scenes are made to participate in the battle outside as the people they play in the brothel.) The fakeness of the sets (complete with fake horse neighs and jury murmurs for the various acting out of fetish scenes) makes intellectual sense to go along with the fakeness of the rest of it (Winters' closing line is great), but the literal, set-like play, and the lousy stock footage, takes away from the melodrama, I think. It's a little difficult to watch, and the direction isn't very good; the decadence, the threats made by Falk, some of the lines -- it'd work better on the page. But it becomes larger as it goes along, and is successful in an unconventional way.

The strangest moments are the emotional ones, where emotion pierces through the artifice -- which, honestly, is rare, almost limited to the scene where the man licks the prostitute's shoe and she begins to cry, or the one where a prostitute-turned-file-clerk longs to be a prostitute again just for an hour. The most instantly recognizable Genet-like image is the one of Nimoy behind bars, his hairy chest exposed. Nimoy, whose appearance is brief, is very good here; he has the emotion through movement that Falk instead strains for. If Daniel Day-Lewis was doing Columbo in "Gangs of New York," then Falk is doing Bill the Butcher, with his German-Southern accent, mustache, and histrionics.

The three men from the brothel are necessarily flaky -- they seem to be acting in another film. I think the awesome Shelley Winters is the only one who really nails her performance: her recognizable inflection, the effortless "a" pauses in her speech, the svelte hand movements; she's most in tune to what's going on, and she pulls it off beautifully. There's a startling kiss between her and a girl from the brothel that must have been a jolt to audiences at the time; it still seems violent, even though it's done seemingly out of affection. 8/10

Jean Genet's great surrealist comedy was filmed, brilliantly in 1963, by Joseph Strick and is thought to be among the first American art-movies. It's certainly not commercial and Strick makes few real concessions to the medium. It's stage-bound (sound stage-bound?)and no mistake and probably all the better for it and the translation, (it is scripted by Ben Maddow), is first-class.

Set, fundamentally, in a brothel which is more a 'house of illusion' in an unnamed country during a revolution it's about artifice and role-playing, power games for the under-privileged. When the real Minister of Justice, Archbishop and General are killed three of Madame Irma's customers take on the roles under the guidance of the real Chief of Police, (Peter Falk). Nothing really happens and nothing is really resolved. 'You can go home now', Madame Irma tell us, the audience, after the revolution appears to be quashed. Everything is an illusion.she assures us, even real life.

This may well be Genet's best work and Strick and Maddow do it proud. The performances are first-rate. Shelly Winters is particularly fine as the bisexual Madame Irma and Lee Grant is often astonishing as her assistant and part-time lover Carmen. (When this movie came out Grant had yet to make much of an impression on the big screen). Although miscast, Peter Falk handles his speech to the crowds beautifully. Daring in its day, (we have foot fetishism and a lesbian kiss), the film quickly disappeared from the circuits despite very favourable reviews and today is seldom seem. But it is still a classic and really should not be missed.