Femme has a lot of nerve. It opens with a hate crime, coldly and brutally carried out against the protagonist, whose personality until this point has been that of a person who calls it like he sees it. He does see something in the attacker who beats him moments after the assailant suffers a perceived insult to his manhood, but then writers/directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping embark upon a story that is, moment to moment, impossible to predict. Yes, the film has a lot of nerve to go down this route, and the journey to get to a place of such complicated emotions is a rocky one. It helps that the directors have found precisely the right actors on whose shoulders to place this uneasy material.
The victim of the attack is Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a Black gay man who works as a drag performer in London. The opening scene gives a glimpse of his dancing and singing skills, suggesting a serious and disciplined artist at work. Once the assault occurs, that bright light within Jules vanishes in an instant. It’s a horrifying scene, capturing Jules’ shriveled and cowering figure beneath the shoes of Preston (George MacKay), a rough-looking individual with a violent streak that masks a deep insecurity. A few months later, Jules is living in self-imposed exile in his apartment, refusing to leave even upon the encouragement of his roommates.
As the logic of this kind of story dictates, when Jules finally does leave, it’s to patronize a sauna where he sees his attacker. Preston notices Jules, too, but does not recognize him. In a truly gnarly turn of events, Preston suggests the two of them go out, as long as the date remains a secret between the two. Clearly, Preston is closeted to a dangerous and toxic degree, but Jules devises a plan: secretly film the two of them during their love-making sessions, then send the compilation of videos to Preston’s overtly homophobic friends. In order to pull this off, the gambit requires a good deal of restraint on Jules’ part, as well as the fortitude to face his trauma and the source of it head-on.
These would be fascinating and unbelievably tricky roles to play for any pair of actors, and Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay nail the strange, knotty quasi-romance that develops between their characters. Preston is a hateful person who is himself full of hate, but there is also an element deep within of a man entangled by his own homophobia and a deep attraction to men that he can neither explain nor ignore. Jules is righteously determined to fight back against this man whose prejudice led to violence, but as they grow closer, Preston’s nature becomes clearer. Both actors are quite good at exploring this through silence and in the chemical atmosphere of the spaces they share.
Eventually, though, the sheer strangeness of this relationship, as well as the inevitability of the façade crashing down, eventually outweighs whatever early interest we have in exploring these men as characters in their own right. They become narrative devices instead, solely working toward the scene where the truth must be made clear to Preston about who Jules is to him, and Femme stumbles into territory that feels a bit messy in a way that recalls a soap opera more than anything else. As an acting showcase, the movie is more worthwhile than as a dramatic effort.
Photo courtesy of Utopia
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