Le balcon

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.

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.

The Balcony is the stuffy sort of film that the American industry once thought was 'art', even as the effects of the nouvelle vague began to filter through suggesting otherwise. A provocative play by a continental author (Jean Genet), full of prestigious and soon-to-be-illustrious names (Shelly Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant, Leonard Nimoy, et al), shot in crisp black and white (duly nominated for an academy award), music by a genius (Stravinsky) spiced up with cinema vérité news footage and laced with sexual-political overtones, how could it not be? Contemporary reviewers obviously went along: "This film is a remarkable achievement from any point of view. All in all ... not to be missed" (The Guardian). "..first choice for the year among American films" (Daily Telegraph), and so on. Unfortunately now the results seem less impressive. It's stagey, full of self-conscious dialogue played self consciously, and determinedly un-cinematic. Watching the rather turgid results these days the viewer is more likely to wonder what went wrong.

Director Strick virtually made a career out of determined literary adaptations: following the present film came Ulysses, Tropic Of Cancer (1970) and Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man (1977). He made documentaries too, but it was with the former that he strived most to be culturally meaningful, even if the results were never first-rate. The Balcony was the first such outing, and perhaps the least impressive - a production in which, as others have noticed, his literalness as an adaptor hinders rather than encourages the transfer to big screen. As Genet amply demonstrated in his masterpiece Un chant d'Amour (1950), artistic significance can often be best created by the most indirect and poetic means - a process that the director might have here, with benefit, remembered.

Set in a brothel, Strick's film takes place within a city wracked by (unspecified) revolution. Oblivious to the upheavals happening outside, the power-deprived customers of the whorehouse are sold illusions of power, living out their fantasies before the women as such characters as judges, bishops and generals. Things change though, when one of the madam's (Shelly Winters) occasional lovers, the Chief of Police (Peter Falk) asks for help. First, it's for her to impersonate the Queen, then for her clients to help end the revolution by acting out those roles they had only played in fantasy. They succeed admirably in those parts they have acted out for so long; explosions devastate the city. Then, they too are deposed by a new revolution...

The result is an uneven and somewhat tedious melange of humour, surrealism, melodrama and socio-political comment. There are important parallels to be drawn between the immoralities outside and inside the brothel, but in the event the balance is rather laboured, while many of the observations remain rootless. While Genet's play undoubtedly must have worked in its original theatrical incarnation, plonked down here amidst a rout of American thespians determined to see it done justice, its edge is fatally blunted by studio compromise, the result frequently, boredom. Naturally the work of a homosexual former social outcast and thief would have suffered in any American adaptation at this time, as cultural sensibilities were so different. His brothel, supposedly serving the "wildest ambitions and fantasies of its clients" is here without either real fantasy or wildness, in a film that desperately seeks genuine politicization to sink its teeth into, but merely chews around the edges of 'significance'. It might have been a brave project for the time, even daring, but the obscure dullness of it all today is unforgivable.

Stravinsky's music intersperses the action, but being a selection of existing pieces plonked down in situ rather than an original score - in fact, the composer never wrote one - its divertimento clarity only points up how glum and obscure much of the action is which it supports. Jerry Fielding's adaptation of A Soldier's Tale for Straw Dogs (1971) shows how some effective arranging might have been done, but one supposes Stravinsky had the casting vote on this occasion and was presumably happy with the result. Winters is fatally miscast as Madame Irma, the 'lesbian letch' who runs the show, entirely missing the sophistication her role demands. Other members of the cast act out their roles with appropriately straight faces, but only Peter Falk retains lasting credit, lending his part something of the intensity it demands.

No less a talent than Fassbinder also struggled, perhaps surprisingly, with a Genet adaptation when he directed the unsatisfactory, though considerably more watchable, Querelle in 1982. Outside of Genet's own film, perhaps the most memorable adaptation of his work also stars Shelly Winters, this time freed from the millstone of cultural obligation: the cult item Poor Pretty Eddy (1973, wrongly given by IMDb as a second version of The Balcony) which, in its own bad taste way is probably a 100 times more subversive than Strick's establishment effort...

Failed minds, postmodernists who recognize no means of defining the categories of reality, and recognize no hard-and-fast universe of what is real and what is not are "impractical" at achieving any sort of results; how could anyone unable to define what a film is confront an allegorical work of art? How, I ask could anyone understand a one-to-one correspondence between a 'second level of reference' and a primary one, if one is helpless to comprehend the priorities and internal-dynamic properties of the first? Case in point: the way in which imprecise thinkers try, mentally, to approach Joseph Strick's well-paced filmic version of Jean Genet's "The Balcony". "The Balcony" is a favorite film of mine; not because of its obscurity, and I grant it can be read in several ways at some places; I like it rather because its author tries to deal with the false philosophy of "postmodernism" itself; this is a film used for exposing its utter vacuousness. The way the author, and Ben Maddow in his perceptive screenplay, tried to show why pretension, authority-structures and believers are an endless circle of meaningless human shells was devastatingly simple. The author staged a revolution, in an unnamed urban city. Instead of dealing with specifics, the filmmaker followed his plot line by providing graphic images of what happens during any rebellion or revolt--a categorical expose of rebellions and revolutions as violent exercises of disagreement by dissidents; then he confined the dramatic action for the most part to a brothel; there under the direction of Madame (Shelley Winters) and her assistant (Lee Grant), clients play out their fantasies about power--using women as their paid "victims", co-participants and surrogate result-receivers and perpetrators. The Madam's boy friend, the real Chief of Police, (Peter Falk) then enters and is desperate. The General of the army, the Bishop of the Church and the the chief Justice of the country have all been killed; Madam suggests replacements--her best clients are better than the originals at these roles. He is persuaded. So are they. But once they have been sworn in outside, the rebellion gets real for them too. And they, and the rebel leader and the chief, are all driven back inside, to confront the emptiness of their exercises of power--the fact that only power over the real universe and oneself matter; that any other sort of "power- mongering" is meaningless after all; since pretensions are universal and a pragmatic structure that argues only that, "The Establishment needs to be maintained", its proponents forget that this is as anarchistic a premise as is anarchy--"any rebellion on any terms"--would have been. In the film, there are a few moments that seem like stage moments; but most of the narrative I suggestis fought out on a idea-level far above the average film. As the Madam, Shelley Winters is very capable but seems to play the film on too literal a level here and there; Grant is much slyer and in keeping with the spirit of the work. As the police chief, Falk keeps his difficult role this side of surreality with considerable skill; as his opponent, Leonard Nimoy seems very capable also. As the three power figures, Kent Smith as the General is superb, full-voiced, authoritative and compelling; Jeff Corey makes an arch Bishop, intellectual and devious; and Peter Brocco as the Judge is a well-trained classic actor also, very much capable of delivering judgments. As the women they boss over and are controlled by, Arnette Jens, Joyce Jameson and Ruby Dee are all very good and very intelligent; it is to be regretted all have been denied more work in films and the longer parts they deserved to play. The film's ending is celebrated; as some reviewers have noted, the ending working as well on film as it did in the staged version--you will have to view the film to judge this point for yourself; but the film seems to have been made yesterday, as others have suggested largely because its authors handle ideas about reality on a level of categorical truth, not specifics. George Folsey is credited with the cinematography, which is quite varied and difficult; the remainder of the credits are those of the original stage production used here in a translated fashion. The use of the characters within the brothel to comment upon the actions going on in the outside world needs to be noted; this chorus-like rediscovery, notable in "Pride and Prejudice" for instance, is a genuine reviving of an idea-level often missing from post WWII works. The title "The Balcony" refers to the idea that those not immediately engaged in activities within the "house" are spectators of reality, hence able to comment upon its ongoing progress; this also means they can do so in a sense relative to the world outside their limited mini-universe, being detached observers like those in a theatrical "balcony". I urge everyone interested in powerful drama to give this interesting "stunt" or limited-allegory of the world a try. I am an admirer of its purpose and of its execution.

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