It’s Desire vs. Domination in the Intensely Erotic Femme

Photo: Brigade Publicity

Every intimate scene in Femme has an undercurrent of violence. A grope against a tree trunk and a face shoved into and scraping against bark; a fumble in the backseat of a car, limbs first entangled and then held down. These are moments of dominance and submission slicked with sweat and swathed in secrets, and how they hover on a razor’s edge of pleasure and pain gives the transgressively erotic thriller Femme its potency. Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s knotty feature takes on sex in all its definitions and connotations — the biological identifier, the physical act between two bodies — to question how fixed our identities are. All of it, Femme compellingly argues through dynamic lead performances from Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay, is malleable. Sex can be a rigid rubric of performance for some and a fluid experiment in expression for others. The friction between those two perspectives fascinates Femme, a volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.

An adaptation of Freeman and Ng’s 2021 short film (starring the also-phenomenal duo of Paapa Essiedu and Harris Dickinson), Femme begins with a trio of scenes that lay out its aims. First, exuberance: Jules (Stewart-Jarrett), a popular drag performer under the name Aphrodite Banks, stomps, grinds, and writhes onstage to Shygirl’s song “Cleo.� The lyrics hint at where this story is going: “I can play anybody, I can be your fantasy.� Next, frisson: Still in his drag gear, Jules goes to a corner store for more cigarettes, where he crosses paths with neck-tattooed bruv Preston (MacKay). Preston gave Jules the once-over earlier when the two stood outside the club, but now — surrounded by his homophobic crew — he throws a gay slur at him, and he doesn’t like when Jules snaps back with “Takes one to know one, innit?� And finally, brutality: As Jules hurries back to his nightlife safe haven, he’s followed, taunted, and assaulted by Preston and his boys, an act that causes Jules to pull away from the Aphrodite persona and from the femininity with which he had previously been so comfortable.

All of this happens before the film’s title card hits the screen, and functionally, it handily sets up both characterization (Jules’s self-assurance, Preston’s self-hatred) and motivation (lust, loathing). What makes these scenes so effective, though, is that they capture all the tensions the rest of Femme will explore with complexity and contradiction. When Jules later sees Preston at a gay bathhouse and his attacker does not recognize him, does he go home with him because of the initial magnetism between them or because Jules is already plotting some sort of revenge? When Preston takes Jules out for dinner, goes through the intimate gestures of sharing his meal (who knew a man scraping marrow out of bones could be so hot?), and makes eye contact with Jules while stacking cash on the table to pay for the date, is he asserting his manliness or trying to impress Jules? How do our ideas of gender affect our preferences and our fetishes, whether sex is transactional or spiritual, and whether we can fuck someone into loving us?

Femme doesn’t ascribe to one answer or the other because the truth, it argues, is somewhere in the messy in-between. (It’s a lot like Paul Verhoeven’s masterful Elle in how it approaches sexual consent and vengeance.) There are predictable ways Femme could tackle gender expression, sexual attraction, and racial code-switching in its portrait of how Jules and Preston treat each other. But every time the film nearly becomes something formulaic — a romantic drama when Jules and Preston finally kiss; a satire of straight-male friendship when Preston’s friends pressure him to share stories about being in prison — it diverges and returns to its primary interest in lust as a means of expressing and conceding control. Much of Femme is unflashy by necessity; it’s a story whose emotional admissions and racy rendezvous take place primarily in an SUV, in abandoned parking lots, or in a dark wood, anywhere that privacy is not quite guaranteed but the interruption of it is an aphrodisiac. Instead, its subversions rely on Freeman and Ng’s writing, which is often ambiguous enough to play both sides of the fence (Are they or aren’t they falling for each other?), and Stewart-Jarrett’s and MacKay’s assured performances, which walk the line between agitation and attraction every time they share the screen.

Femme at first leans on the contrasts between its leads, on Stewart-Jarrett’s capacity to play unmoored and accommodating and MacKay’s dick-swinging swagger. While Jules of course has a rightful reason to detest Preston, Freeman and Ng are careful to frame MacKay’s thick-necked and tattooed body so that Preston is, in some primal way, alluring. If MacKay’s character had no appeal whatsoever, the film’s suspense and its climax wouldn’t be nearly as engaging as it is. To counter all that brawn, Stewart-Jarrett exudes a chameleonic power; he’s a shape-shifter whose ease in moving between personalities during the third act interrupts everything we thought we knew about Jules and his masculine-feminine balance. It’s a whirlwind of psychosexual teasing that feels like the film edging us ever closer to the satisfaction of understanding exactly what motivates Preston and Jules’s smutty one-upmanship, and in realizing for ourselves the appeal of submission, acquiescence, and consent. When Femme blows up its own argument for love as a cure for all ills, you’ll feel it.