George MacKay kicks off the third act of Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s feature debut, Femme, with what should by now be considered a prototypical MacKay exercise: Nigh-untraceable facial tweaks. As Preston, the film’s co-lead, MacKay spends most of the preceding 70 minutes in attack mode, a rattlesnake coiled and ready to sink its fangs into any putz foolish enough to handle him. In rarer moments, he is disarmed by Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), the film’s lead. In the rarest moment, he wakes up in Jules’ bed, and his eyes stretch with animal panic, slacken into bewilderment, and then relax into what he’s sought all along: Contentment.
This part of MacKay’s performance is fleeting but revealing, and demonstrative of Preston’s struggle against his internalized self-loathing; by unfortunate but unavoidable extension, it’s also about MacKay’s approach to the “closeted gay” trope, that worn-out character cliché, a person—in this case, a man—who knows they’re gay, but for whatever reason, whether substantiated or not, they can’t be gay, and they disguise their sexuality with hooliganism and, more often than not, violence. Preston is so desperate to hide his queerness that he opts for both. In fact, that’s how he and Jules meet: In a convenience store, with Jules in full drag after finishing a show at a nightclub in London, and Preston flanked by his cronies, who expect a physical rebuke when Jules pulls Preston’s card and accuses him of eyeing him down outside the club earlier in the night.
Femme takes that chance encounter and does something interesting with it: Making Jules, not Preston, its focal point, and consequently backgrounding the trope in favor of foregrounding how Jules lives with himself after the assault. The temptation to structure Femme as an exploration of “toxic masculinity,” rooted in queer identity, seems not to have presented itself to Freeman and Ping. Jules occupies so much of the movie’s time, and the screenplay (which the duo also wrote) so firmly entrenches itself in his psyche, that neither the toxic male nor the closeted gay man seem to be of interest to Femme’s authors. They’re more concerned with the fallout of homophobic violence than with the cause, and more compelled by what Jules does when faced with the opportunity to even the score with Preston.
Quietly, and in keeping with its theme, discreetly, Femme is revenge cinema, a story about wronged parties exacting justice for themselves when the systems that should do so either can’t or don’t. Here, they can’t; no one reports the attack, and when Jules sees Preston in a gay sauna, the window has closed. So Jules hatches a plan: Seduce Preston, surreptitiously film their sex, then post it online. As shadow boxing is to Oh Dae-su in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, scouring “exposing my hot straight brother-in-law / friend / neighbor” porn for ideas on how best to capture the deed is to Jules. It’s a bad plan. It’s a sloppy plan. It’s a dangerous plan and—even acknowledging that Preston is an animal—a cruel plan, and Femme does what nearly feels unthinkable by digging into the mess of Jules’ need for retribution as well as his growing attraction to Preston.
Where MacKay brings wild-eyed internalized neuroses coupled with explosive outbursts to Preston, Stewart-Jarrett brings the agony of indecision, victimhood and affection to Jules. Freeman and Ping put him front and center, lingering on his face in close-up and medium, to throw his moral dilemma into sharp relief. There is a world where Preston can be Preston, where wounds can heal; a world where Jules can, through role reversal in power dynamics, achieve a satisfactory comeuppance for his bully. In time, Jules learns how to dominate Preston, who for all his bluster wants to be told what to do—and once he gets what he really wants, something like tenderness emerges in their sex. But there’s also a world where the secret between them, that Preston battered Jules and in their present circumstances has no idea who he is, is too devastating and far too perilous to allow for love (or whatever we should call what the two end up sharing together).
Grounding the film in so much discomfiting tension lets Freeman and Ping get away with fixating on a queer experience contextualized through suffering, just as their choice of perspective lets them treat Preston’s hatred as a motif instead of the subject. Jules is a victim of homophobic rage, make no mistake. But he’s given the agency required to do something to reclaim his security and confidence, even though the means by which he does are reckless. Femme acknowledges its tropes and clichés; the film never soft-shoes the important part they play in its structure. What it does with them, though, feels fresh. Revenge is often ill-advised, even nihilistic. Femme’s revenge is a stamped guarantee of self-destruction.
Directors: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping
Writers: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping
Starring: Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, George MacKay, Aaron Heffernan, John McCrea, Asha Reid
Release Date: March 22, 2024
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.