The Balcony Review:

Madame Irma (Winters) runs a brothel but it’s not your average house of ill repute, here the clientele come to live out their fantasies as men of power. In the city outside a revolution rages and the injured Chief of Police (Falk) seeks refuge at the establishment and convinces the men to pretend to be important figureheads in order to stop the chaos.

Director Joseph Strick, who would later use the brothel fantasyland idea in his adaptation of Ulysses, takes a brave stab at bringing Jean Genet’s stage play to the screen. Packed with dark humour, violent undertones and twisted eroticism (although don’t get too excited, this is 1963) The Balcony is packed with risqué subtext but Strick boxes himself in with restrictions that a play has to work within. The sets are stagey, though this is partly the nature of the brothel, and characters seem to stick to long monologues that screenwriter Ben Maddow must have lifted in great chunks from the play. When the story does break out of the confines and venture into the daylight it quickly runs back inside embarrassed by stock footage and backlight projections that no filmmaker should rely on so heavily. Luckily it’s not a night at the opera as the movie rightly clocks in at a lean 82 minutes to balance out the sometimes overlong scenes littered with often hammy speeches.

Those of you willing to accept the narrow rules The Balcony makes for itself can be safely informed that you will at least be rewarded for your efforts and for the cerebral viewer there are some important issues examined. As Winters points out that from the dawn of time a brothel has been part and parcel of every city, allowing men to live out their dreams and here it is portrayed as a Hollywood funhouse complete with costumes and props, lights and cameras capturing the little dramas being played out. The danger is to portray the men as weak, dominated by their own sexual desires for women but it is playing out the characters that is the main desire and Winters herself certainly comes off as more mumsy, the matron of the house, certainly not some leather-clad dominatrix. Then enter Falk, complete with unidentifiable accent, who lets them live out their dreams for real and we’re into Moon Over Parador territory with everyday laborers fooling the public into thinking they’re men of power. It’s the confidence that convinces people that they’re judges, generals and bishops and the plot nicely riffs on the power of perception and the corrupting power that comes with it. Soon the men believe they’re own hype, like in Wag the Dog, the media and it’s actors and directors, become above the law, controllers of society. While all this may sound heavy Strick plays it out swiftly and wraps it all up with a smirking denouement. Without uniforms men have nothing.

With a knowing wink The Balcony questions your belief in authority and how men worm their way into positions of power. Though constricted at times it still informs our world today, with media infecting even more of everyday life it’s impossible to escape the men who govern us but maybe now you’d question who’s behind the costume.

Picture & Audio

Surprisingly good with a sharp widescreen transfer. Obviously for a film of it’s age there are some dust and scratches from the original but overall it is crisp though sometimes a little too grey. Even the stock footage, a low point in the film however, is very well reproduced.

Audio, again very clear, no problems.

Extras

None

Rich Badley

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