Jules enters a corner shop while wearing his full drag costume after completing his stage performance in the beginning of Femme. The fluorescent lights create an unyielding environment. The camera shows him extending his hand to grab cigarettes which he buys regularly yet the audience detects a tense atmosphere in this scene.
What follows will shatter him, but right now, in this liminal space between persona and person, he's just a man buying something at a counter. I keep thinking about that. About who gets to be ordinary.
The system reveals its design structure through its basic organizational structure. Jules, a Black drag performer played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett with a precision that keeps undoing me, is brutally attacked outside that shop by Preston, a closeted white man running with a pack of lads who needed someone to hate that night. George MacKay delivers a complete performance as Preston through his physicality which shows his tattoos rising toward his neck like an unremovable defensive shield and his muscular build which appears dangerous before he starts speaking. Jules encounters Preston at a bathhouse during his visit several months after their initial meeting. Preston doesn't recognise him without the makeup. Jules does the unthinkable: he goes home with his attacker.
The economics degree program becomes active at this point. What Jules is doing is, no wait, let me back up. Jules needs to experience physical punishment before he can achieve his goal of revenge. He will seduce Preston, film them together, destroy the man's reputation by outing him to the world. The currency is intimacy. The interest rate functions as his personal trauma which grows in intensity throughout each night. Jules follows a specific pattern when he appears because he reveals his weaknesses to get people to share their deepest secrets. The columns of the chart fail to contain emotions because they continue to move freely.
Directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, expanding their own 2021 short, have built something genuinely uncomfortable here. Not in the cheap way. The process requires you to stay with opposing forces until your body becomes too tired to sit anymore. Preston is a monster. The real me," he tells his friends about his drag persona, "and I was the performance."Jules is also maybe, possibly, starting to want something else. "Jules has every right to vengeance. Preston is also a man so terrified of his own desire that he's built a life around destroying it in others. The statement takes on a new meaning after observing him build multiple personas which he uses to reach a point where he can cause pain.
The film refuses to tell you how to feel about any of this. God, that's rare.
Stewart-Jarrett bears an unfeasible burden which includes the silent aftermath of trauma and his ability to play video games with Preston's roommates while hiding his potential romantic interest in the man who attacked him. You watch him and you're never quite sure which Jules is in the room. MacKay delivers a performance which reveals hidden elements which the script intentionally leaves out of its storyline. We don't need Preston's backstory. The present is damning enough.
James Rhodes uses his cinematography to depict London as a nighttime-only city which becomes a place of neon lights and dark shadows where people can either conceal their desires or face their pursuit. The visual language is seduction itself. I would forget Preston's actions at times. I think that's the point. The question of whether Jules forgets too, or whether this is all still calculation, remains beautifully unresolved.
The film contains some weak moments because its short-film structure sometimes feels like it needs additional content to fill the space. The last frame of the movie stands as its most powerful element. I won't describe it. The experience left me with an empty feeling which I needed to walk outside after the event and I continue to feel its impact until today.
What does it mean to reclaim power through self-sacrifice when you give yourself to someone who has already taken everything from you?The display shows his strength but it could also mark his current attempt to give up. Femme remained silent in response. It just watches, and waits for you to find something in the silence that you can live with.
