The Balcony Review
Jean_Genet's oeuvre isn't meant to entertain or even engage on the level that most fiction does. More provocation than anything else, the French dissident's writing encompasses a long series of attacks on political corruption, bourgeois moralism, and the humdrum aesthetics of the cultural status quo. Even more so than his novels, Genet's plays rely on ritualized action and schematic symbolism to expose the hypocrisy of cultural institutions. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the play +The Balcony and its 1963 cinematic adaptation. Directed by Joseph_Strick from a script by Genet and Ben_Maddow, The Balcony presents a world in which costume and gesture determine identity. Here, the inmates can take over the asylum by merely impersonating the doctors. This being a Genet scenario, of course, the inmates are actually whores and johns and the asylum is society itself, as embodied by a deliberately unspecified country in the throes of a madcap revolution. Viewers expecting light satire, let alone characters with which they can identify, won't find much to like about the film. But audiences in tune with cinema's less naturalistic, more polemic possibilities will find The Balcony an intriguing document of its time -- and an interesting companion piece to Rainer_Werner_Fassbinder's Querelle. Brian J. Dillard, Rovi
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