At the 2021 British Indie Film Awards, directors Ng Choon Ping and Sam H. Freeman were recipients of Best British Short Film for their 18-minute anxiety attack, FEMME. In the award-winning short, a drag artist (then played by I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu) gets into the car of a flirtatious drug dealer (Harris Dickinson), leading to dangerous results. However, Ping and Freeman never intended or expected that short film to garner awards, predicting it would be a platform to finance the same story extrapolated into a feature. Little did they know then that the short they made and its subsequent acclaim would catapult that feature forward, acquiring funding from BBC Films and garnering a world premiere at the 2023 Berlinale.
Opening FEMME, drag artist Jules (now played by a fierce, sensational Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) waltzes onto stage as Aphrodite Banks, her jewel-encrusted outfit glimmering under the spotlight, her pursed lips seducing the awaiting queer audience as she lip syncs to the music. As a black, queer femme man, Jules – whose gender identity presents as feminine while in drag – holds very little power in the London society in which she lives. So when on the stage, the power it allots Jules becomes hers to take hold of and make her own. After the performance, Jules finds herself without cigarettes, forced to head to a corner shop anxiously, a harmless, innocuous act for the privileged and the unknowingly powerful. But Jules is anything but privileged and is powerless when off the stage and out of Aphrodite’s glam. While there, Jules experiences a violent homophobic assault at the hands of Preston (this time played by George Mackay), a cockney ‘lad’s lad’ and ‘entrepreneur’, peacocking his heterosexuality with a toxic bravado and neck tattoos.
This reivew first appeared on February 26th 2023. Full review linked below
Femme | TAKE ONE | Berlinale 2023
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