"Femme" - Film Review
To call Femme a thriller is to make assumptions before the film even begins. The genre creates a binary of sorts where there is a firm, distinct line between right and wrong. Femme is an exercise in existing within the gray area, in the moral ambiguity of the pursuit of revenge. As the old adage goes, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is a drag performer in London who leads an outgoing life. He’s surrounded by friends, dances the night away, and isn’t afraid to speak out against people who yell slurs at him on the street. This is how Jules’ path crosses with Preston’s (George MacKay). Jules counters the homophobic verbal taunts thrown his way by saying that he knows Preston was checking him out. Preston retaliates by brutally attacking Jules and leaving him to stumble to safety.
courtesy of utopia
Months later, Jules is a shell of the person he once was. He barely leaves his apartment, has withdrawn from his friends, and spends most of his time playing Street Fighter. Jules eventually ventures out to a gay sauna. It’s there that he once again crosses paths with Preston, who doesn’t seem to recognize him out of his drag outfit. The two begin to spend time together, and Jules makes a plan to exact his revenge. He’ll film them having sex and post it online to out Preston.
“Frustration, confusion, a sprinkling of self-loathing.” This is how Jules describes his feelings about halfway through the film. It’s the perfect distillation of his relationship with Preston and the film’s larger themes. In this superhero era of filmmaking, there’s been a very clear distinction between right and wrong. We’re given the answers long before the film even begins, but with recent fare like Anatomy of a Fall and Femme, the audience isn’t spoonfed answers. These films relish in the ambiguity of it all and encourage people to have conversations with their fellow moviegoers to parse through the complexity of what they just watched. The fact that Femme began as a short film (starring Paapa Essiedu and Harris Dickinson as the leads) speaks to its depth and potential to create conversations.
courtesy of utopia
Femme is not an easy movie to sit with after it ends, mainly because there are so many layers pushing at each other and creating a friction that rubs at the audience throughout the entire film. When a movie begins and ends with the same set-up of a scene, the audience is going to directly compare and contrast the two. How are they different, how are they the same, what does it say about the characters that they’ve found themselves in the same circumstances once again? Femme forces the audience to question how revenge can make a person feel. Is revenge inherently a flawed justice to seek? Will any resolution fill the void that was left by the instigating violence? Are we all seeking to make the whole world blind when revenge is the only thing on our minds? Further, what does it say about society’s obsession with violence that when a brutal attack occurs, the natural inclination is to return the favor? Violent behavior has the ability to breed more violence, and that traps all of us in a society that encourages anger to win. Femme is a gnarly, thorny return to the world of film noir by addressing topics that are pressingly contemporary.
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