At the 2021 British Indie Film Awards, directors Ng Choon Ping and Sam H. Freeman were recipients of Best British Short Film for their 18-minute anxiety attack, FEMME. In the award-winning short, a drag artist (then played by I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu) gets into the car of a flirtatious drug dealer (Harris Dickinson), leading to dangerous results. However, Ping and Freeman never intended or expected that short film to garner awards, predicting it would be a platform to finance the same story extrapolated into a feature. Little did they know then that the short they made and its subsequent acclaim would catapult that feature forward, acquiring funding from BBC Films and garnering a world premiere at the 2023 Berlinale.
Opening FEMME, drag artist Jules (now played by a fierce, sensational Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) waltzes onto stage as Aphrodite Banks, her jewel-encrusted outfit glimmering under the spotlight, her pursed lips seducing the awaiting queer audience as she lip syncs to the music. As a black, queer femme man, Jules – whose gender identity presents as feminine while in drag – holds very little power in the London society in which she lives. So when on the stage, the power it allots Jules becomes hers to take hold of and make her own. After the performance, Jules finds herself without cigarettes, forced to head to a corner shop anxiously, a harmless, innocuous act for the privileged and the unknowingly powerful. But Jules is anything but privileged and is powerless when off the stage and out of Aphrodite’s glam. While there, Jules experiences a violent homophobic assault at the hands of Preston (this time played by George Mackay), a cockney ‘lad’s lad’ and ‘entrepreneur’, peacocking his heterosexuality with a toxic bravado and neck tattoos.
“The scenario may have gone on to be a redundant rehash. Still, since the audience knows of Preston’s impact on Jules’ life before this meet, it gives it a sinister underlying anxiety.”
Months later, we find Jules stuck in a perpetual state of triggered PTSD from the attack and seeking solace in a gay sauna. It’s a place to feel safe as an effeminate gay but still unable to partake in any sexual activity due to the attack. That is until Preston turns up at the sauna, revealing his intimidation tactics are repressed homosexuality. But even in a space designed to be safe, Preston’s externalised homophobia remains prevalent as he refuses a man’s advances, calling the man a derogatory slur in the process. Jules follows his abuser, compelled into voyeuristic observations on Preston, who instilled such fear and inflicted violence so casually against him, now in a space not designed for his heterosexual performance. Preston spots Jules watching him and beckons across for him to get into his car. Jules and Preston begin bonding, enacting the same enemies-to-lovers trope seen countless times before within the media. The scenario may have gone on to be a redundant rehash. Still, since the audience knows of Preston’s impact on Jules’ life before this meet, it gives it a sinister underlying anxiety. With this revenge thread thrown into what could have been an echo of familiar tropes, this thriller addressing power reclamation – a yellow hoodie recurs as a brilliant, powerful signifier of this – gets a wonderfully fresh queer twist.
In FEMME, Jules’ deep brown deer-in-headlights eyes track Preston like a gazelle fearful of a predatory lion. This analogy is one that Ping and Freeman’s film twists and reworks as it progresses. Preston – embossed with a lion tattoo – is initially the king of the urban jungle where he sells drugs. Jules – with delicate femme frame and his drag persona prancing on stage – is a majestic gazelle. But the directors aren’t interested in keeping this analogy to a simple and fixed binary. Jules’ act of chasing Preston to enact a nefarious revenge scheme means that he becomes the predator in a film that constantly shuffles the dynamics of power around.
Of course, as much as Preston likes Jules, he can’t outwardly show affection. A trait of toxic masculinity, he has to detach himself from his emotions constantly. This is where Ping and Freeman begin their dissection of both gender performance and identity. Judith Butler once proposed that gender is performative, that the “performance of gender is what makes gender exist”. Ping and Freeman show this by having Jules strip away his femme personality to fit in with the gang of thugs Preston calls friends, along with the thawing of Preston’s performative swagger in front of Jules’ friends. Their genders, and the stereotypical behaviour they exhibit for survival, become fluid. Their sexualities, or at least their sexual styles, become fluid. Indeed, even Jules’ choice of playing as Chun-Li on Street Fighter, taking down every single male fighter they encounter, subtly adds to the dialogue around gender identity.
Within LGBTQ vocabulary, the phrases “top” and “bottom” are self-designated labels designed to signify who takes power in sexual intercourse, Top signifying dominance and Bottom signifying submission. In FEMME, these labels – and Jules and Preston’s usual sexual habits – shift. By placing both characters at different levels of fluctuating power, Ping and Freeman comment on the spectrum of gender performance. The contrast is sharp as Preston’s crude patois is toned down to a delicate brogue, while Jules’ femme inflections are missing, using a more brash tone to pass within the dude-bro culture Preston inhabits.
“By choosing revenge porn as motivation and refusing to condemn Jules’ actions, the directors are choosing to talk about trauma’s impact on one’s moral compass, asking audiences to engage within an ethical limbo.”
As the film builds to a crescendo of violence, its action is shot in intimate close-ups that highlight these characters’ visceral anger and repression. Ping and Freeman entertain many different and morally complicated aspects of the queer experience. One that FEMME touches upon is Jules’ revenge plan, a version of revenge porn. His goal – the film’s main foible due to the lack of grace in narrative execution – is to out Preston. That revenge porn, and the non-consensual recording of sex, is a criminal offence is not mentioned within the frugal confines of FEMME’s script. After all, Jules is our protagonist, and the audience’s standard playbook for protagonists is to support them in what they’re doing. By choosing revenge porn as motivation and refusing to condemn Jules’ actions, the directors are choosing to talk about trauma’s impact on one’s moral compass, asking audiences to engage within an ethical limbo.
FEMME comes with these intriguing moral grey areas that make the picture so utterly compelling, despite the broad strokes and cliché from which the narrative framework takes inspiration. There’s no simple binary in this exceptional heart-pounding thriller of broken queer men trying to exist in a broken society.