Thorny Queer Revenge Thriller 'Femme' Explores the Performance of Identity
Performance lies at the heart of Femme – not just with the number performed by drag queen Aphrodite Banks in the film’s opening. The piercing feature debut from Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping is filled with subversive, confronting observations about performance of identity, how queer people choose or are asked to conceal and exaggerate parts of themselves – not because they uniformly want to assimilate into heteronormative society, but because expressing themselves is an inherently validating and radical act. Freeman and Ng’s film is uninterested in the tropes and discourses surrounding today’s queer cinema, electing to tell an urgent story in a simmering neo-noir world that raises complicated questions about queer justice and belonging.
Expanding on a 2021 short film of the same name, Femme stages a uniquely inventive/uncomfortable story of sexual revenge. When Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is violently assaulted by aggressively masculine Preston (George MacKay) while dressed as his alter-ego Aphrodite, he rescinds from his active social and creative life. That is, until he spots Preston at a gay sauna, where his attacker can’t recognise him out of costume. A strange, furtive romance begins between the two men, with Preston taking Jules out for fancy dinners and having sex with him in the woods, in a car – sometimes, if Preston’s brave enough to bring him into the masculine space, his bed.
Jules has an unusual plan for revenge – he’s become fixated on gay pornography that outs straight men by furtively filming them having sex. The complex shades of vindication and arousal Jules gets from these porn videos is jarring and arresting; Jules shifts from a withdrawn state to someone liberated by finding a hyper-specific type of justice that he knows will satisfy his woundedness and completely devastate his attacker’s life. And yet, he knows to keep it secret from his friends – being intimate and duplicitous with someone who hate crimed you is a dangerous place for a vulnerable queer person to be.
