“Based on Julien Gracq's novel, the film recounts the story of four men in a small fortification in the Ardennoise forest as they await - between September 1939 and May 1940 - the German tank advance. ‘Nothing seems to happen.... the slow routine of a half-military half-civilian life, adorned with some amorous adventures, in constant and strict relation with nature and the seasons' (Maurice Roelens).
“‘On the one hand, it announces a future disaster and participates in a generalized effort to master a nightmare (to master it by repetition); on the other hand, Balcony in the Forest is a kind of plunge into reverie and unreality, as if one could repulse the real by the force of desire alone. The movement and structure of the film...oscillate between elation and destruction, Eros and Thanatos.... Balcony in the Forest connects with surrealism by its spirit - if not revolutionary, then at least very critical of the military and social order of 1939.... the soldiers belong to the proletariat that will never gain anything, as capital profits from the war' (Lise Frenkel).” --James Brook