Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy out of costume and the two of them get into a strange sort of relationship – no-strings, ask-no-questions sex. What’s going on here? Is the black guy a masochist who’s taking his liking for a bit of rough to the next level? Is he seeking revenge and keeping his powder dry? Or is it physical attraction pure and simple and there’s not much either man can do about it? Or could it even be love?
George MacKay plays Preston, the dude with the Hitler-adjacent haircut and the neck tattoos, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett plays Jules, the traumatised drag artist who’s not been on stage since the fateful night. Both step into roles created by other actors in this film’s first iteration as an 18-minute short – by Harris Dickinson, who must be fighting MacKay for every role he goes in for right now, and Paapa Essiedu, another name who’s suddenly everywhere.
Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping wrote and directed that short – their directorial debut – and write and direct here again. The first thing to say about this incredibly assured and intense drama is that it doesn’t feel like a short that’s been reworked. It’s urgent and well paced, and there’s not much in the way of padding in its 99 minutes.
That’s largely down to the film’s “what’s really going on here?” basic structure, which Ping and Freeman complement with punchy dialogue and a handful of really gripping and fascinating scenes – Jules’s meet-brute with Preston at the gay sauna; Jules at Preston’s flat having feverish sex when Preston’s flatmate Oz (Aaron Heffernan, another excellent performance) turns up; Jules out for the night with Preston, Oz and his lairy mates, keeping his end of the bargain and not being “faggy”.
The characters in this film don’t so much develop as transition, but for the most part there’s a two-way power dynamic in play, one in which Preston has most of the cards. He’s physically imposing, quick to anger and dominant in the bedroom. Jules is the black to his white, the bottom to his top, the tame to Preston’s tough. The only thing that Jules really has – and it’s decisive – is his outness. The closeted Preston has a weak spot.
In a reversal of their characters, MacKay is all up front in his performance, Stewart-Jarrett a model of actorly containment. We know what Preston thinks, but have little idea what’s going on in Jules’s mind. But the more shots we get of Jules watching porn about closeted gay men having the life banged out of them, the more we wonder…
There is a fair bit of this – Jules watching online porn – but Femme stays fairly safely within the white lines for the most part. Freeman and Ping evoke a laddish London mostly with banter, scenes set in night clubs, beers, a touch of drugs, games of Street Fighter.
Thanks to nifty camerawork and lighting by James Rhodes (who also worked on the short), this is a paradoxically warm film, touches of poetic lighting saving it from the dreaded social realism, colour used well, cameras close to faces to suggest how claustrophobic the Jules/Preston situation is.
There’s also a touch of the sort of psychological dramas Dirk Bogarde was making in the early 1960s – closeted males again – with Freeman and Ping perhaps taking a lead from the likes of 1961’s Victim. This is most definitely a thriller, and the story of Jules (and to an extent Preston) is a personal drama not a sociology essay. Suspense is the intention and together this tightly knit crew – helped enormously by Janota Bzowski’s menacingly bass-heavy score – make it a fraught journey well worth making.
Femme – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
