Jules is a popular drag artist, full of enthusiasm and sauciness and has two close friends (one of them is also secretly in love with him. After his performance, he steps out for a smoke and locks eyes with a shifty stranger across the street. Later on the same night, Jules crosses the same man, Preston, at a shop and the two trade insults after Preston mocks Jules. With his buddies cheering him on, Preston follows, beats, and humiliates Jules while one of them records the incident. This is a brutal homophobic attack that shakes up Jules big time and he slowly spirals into depression and stops performing or going out. A chance encounter with Preston at a bathhouse presents Jules with the opportunity for revenge, and he takes it. He realizes that Preston doesn't remember him. When they both go to Preston's room, his roommates show up. But what a clever man Jules is, announcing himself in the living room fully dressed and even winning over Preston’s roommates with his video game savvy while pretending to be just a friend. Soon, they are having very transgressive sex, made all the more toxically thrilling by the fact that Jules is clearly preparing for some kind of revenge. They are at it at multiple places while Jules slowly starting to realize where Preston's temper stems from. The problem is Jules is starting to fall for this guy. first over a series of hasty backseat sexual encounters, and then eventually over dinners and drinks in which Preston starts to open up. Once Jules has a hold over Preston, he manages to record their sex hoping to upload it to out Preston but he cannot. In the finale, when Preston finds out that Jules indeed the same person hi beat up badly, a brutal fight for survival takes place between two. It ends with an unsettling lack of clarity or position, it’s enough to leave you as bruised as the complexly haunted people it has already drawn so clearly.
“Femme” walks this complicated line between its revenge narrative and self-empowerment. In Jules’ mind, doing what Preston and his friends did to him is the equivalent of getting back at him. But isn’t outing a form of queer violence? And this is what I was saying earlier when I said that you question the whole morality of what Jules is doing , not of Preston, because somewhere as audience, you start to empathize with him. Is Jules beginning to have genuine feelings or friendship or respect for the person that they’re there to take down. The film toes the line between being, on one hand, a story of predator and prey and, on the other, of two young lovers with the chance to become something more. “Femme” is complicated for many reasons, be it for Jules’ revenge saga or when following his healing as he navigates how to outwardly present himself after the events of that brutal night. We see his pain as he withdraws from friends and retreats from the person he was. We see the physical violence he receives from Preston’s fists and kicks in bloody close ups. It is about the pain of queer life, that it leaves out its joy. It's a sexy and stylishly directed thriller with a genuine heat in its depiction of sexuality, thanks to some fantastic performances by both the lead actors, who are brilliant. Interestingly, here race is never an issue. It's the whole queerness aspect. And while it brushes up on some complex issues of desire and sexuality, it resists clear-cut answers, keeping us guessing from start to finish. Watch it because it offers a very unique perspective and is open to interpretation. (7/10)
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