Femme (2024)
Directed & Written by Sam H. Freeman & Ng Choon Ping
Starring Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, George MacKay, Aaron Hefernan, John McCrea, & Antonia Clarke.

Thriller

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SPOILERS!
You’ve been warned.

Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme tells the story of Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a gay man and drag queen targeted by Preston (George MacKay) and a group of men following an encounter in a shop, resulting in a violent homophobic attack that left Jules traumatised. Months after the attack, Jules attempts to get back out into the world, but soon runs into Preston and realises his attacker is ensconced in the closet. Jules decides to flirt with danger and makes contact with Preston, though Preston doesn’t remember it was Jules he attacked months prior. This begins a kind of cat-and-mouse game that only Jules knows is happening. But Jules is playing with a raging fire in Preston that can and likely will burn him, sooner than later.

Femme is a searing neo-noir thriller that walks the line between eroticism and danger better than any film in the past couple decades. The story forces us to look at how internalised homophobia can warp men into violent creatures, but it also makes us confront how trauma can also send people into dark places that only bring more potential trauma into their lives. Even within the queer and trans communities, not everybody understands what it’s like to be a fem-presenting man confronted with hypermasculine violence—how it can warp a city street into the set of a horror film, how it can isolate a person from their own identity, how it can determine every step and every breath you take. Freeman and Ping capture such a raw look at the violence of internalised homophobia, an aspect of queer life that, despite social advances over the past 60-odd years, never seems to go away.
The entire saga between Preston and Jules initially kicks off when Preston calls Jules a faggot and Jules replies: “It takes one to know one.” This ignites Preston’s anger; not exactly towards Jules, though this is how he expresses it, rather towards himself. In the film’s finale, Preston releases his chokehold grip on Jules, a powerful, scary moment that ultimately shows how men suffering from such deeply internalised homophobia as a man like Preston actually hate themselves for being incapable of living as their true selves, all too often pushing their hatred outward onto someone like Jules, who’s essentially incapable of not living as his true self. One scene encapsulates Preston’s self-hatred ironically when he’s lying in bed with Jules and notices the scar Jules has from the homophobic attack. Preston says: “Give me a name.” He’s completely unaware that, in this moment, he actually wants to beat himself up.
Most men who internalise their homophobia crave control because they’re constantly trying to control the presentation of their identity and their performance of gender. Preston is constantly seeking control related to gender performance throughout Femme. He orders Jules via text: “Dress normal. Not faggy.” Later, when Jules sends a sexy ass pic, Preston calls him furious: “You don‘t know who‘s looking.” Freeman and Ping expertly portray Preston’s control, as well as his internalised homophobic revulsion, when they feature a scene in which Preston fucks Jules outside somewhere, then as soon as he cums, he leaves and drives off without Jules, like he’s trying to physically get as far away from the homosexual act he’s committed as humanly possible, as if that somehow means it never happened. Preston is so controlling that he controls his own mind to fool himself into believing he’s not truly a gay man.

Jules’s various transformations—from drag queen Aphrodite (a wonderful use of a name from Greek mythology), to everyday gay Jules, to the pretend masculine persona he’s forced to take on around Preston’s friends—represent a need for many queer men to shapeshift in their daily lives to survive. This is presented in heightened fashion when Jules and Preston are nearly caught after the latter’s friends show up to his flat while the secret lovers are getting naked in his room. But in real life, many queer men who can’t be themselves in ultra-heternormative environments are forced to shapeshift into a fake version of their identity, if only to survive the day. In Femme, Jules, like many real men, has to perform gender differently in order to literally survive a possible fatal hate crime. Sometimes this can cause people to lose themselves, and the identities they create become the people they actually want to be, which leaves their true self behind. Jules puts it succinctly: “It‘s like she [Aphrodite] was the real me, and I was the performance.”

“You want a big man to treat you like a little bitch.”

“Maybe.”

Part of Femme addresses the danger, both figurative and literal, that lies in wait when queer men fetishise hooking up with straight men. While Jules comes around to ideas about revenge, he’s clearly turned on by hooking up with Preston, and, on some level, this plays further into Preston’s internalised homophobia by suggesting they have to sneak around to preserve Preston’s hetero-masculine identity. Worse than anything, Jules appears to get off on the danger to a degree. After he tries to get video of Preston fucking him, he’s scared momentarily by Preston’s angry reaction. Yet something in Jules wants Preston on a romantic level in spite of Preston having committed a hate crime against him, and they wind up fucking again, this time face-to-face; for the first time they make love and kiss. All of this likewise plays into Femme‘s themes concerning trauma, how it can make us desire revenge, and how that desire is capable of taking us to dark places. Jules winds up in a dangerously conflicted headspace, where he teeters on the edge of desire for Preston and desire for revenge against Preston. Thankfully he makes it out alive, albeit only because Preston hates his own closeted sexuality more than he hates Jules.

Femme is a potent neo-noir thriller that refuses to let the viewer relax, particularly if the viewer is queer or trans since many people from both communities can relate to the fear Jules feels during key moments. For straight people with open minds who are willing to take a close look at queer experiences and offer empathy, Femme is still a harrowing experience. We need more of these queer films. Many films and TV shows that address homophobic violence focus solely on gays and lesbians as nothing but victims, as people acted upon and rarely as people who take action. Femme unflinchingly portrays the victimisation of a queer person, no doubt, though it never labels Jules as a victim without power. If anything, the film is about victims taking back their power, for better or worse, and sometimes, as Jules’s story proves, that can get a little messy along the way.