Had my hair properly blown back this week by
Femme the feature debut of directorial team
Sam H. Freeman and
Ng Choon Ping. The erotic thriller stars
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett in a real career-making turn
as Jules, a London drag performer who embarks on a bold revenge mission after being assaulted on the street one night by a sexually insecure thug named Preston played with a live-wire in his teeth by
George MacKay.
The path chosen for Jules' self-reclamation presents itself in a bath house where he encounters Preston months later. Sans makeup and drag attire he seduces his attacker and follows him to his own flat where they are interrupted by the return home of Preston's loutish unsuspecting drug-dealing mates and a hasty improv act makes partners of the pair who arrange to meet again later in a safer place.
Over an extended period Jules' and Preston's relationship develops and complicates, roles change and motives muddle and both characters find themselves challenged and perched at the precipice of real change before the climax. I was fully invested in this one thanks to all the elements; story, performance and style. Just firing on all cylinders here.
Haven't seen the 2021 short film it's a feature treatment of, but I'll be looking for it as well as whatever's next from Freeman and Ping.
Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay should both become household names based on the performances they gave in
Femme. I didn't know either name, so I looked 'em up. Turned out I'd just watched Stewart-Jarrett in another film about a sexual outsider,
Lucas Heyne's
Mope based on the true story of
Stephen Hill a troubled man whose pursuit of fame as a pornstar ended violently.
Hill performed low-quality porn under the name
Steve Driver and never achieved the recognition he craved enough to commit himself to the role of 'mope' in specialty videos. Mopes in porn are the performers who will do the most degrading acts that other performers draw the line at and, if the movie is to be believed, Hill believed his hard, dirty work would pay off one day if he stuck with it.
But it didn't.
Despite his commitment to the grind, his pursuit of gimmicks and his partnership with another mope, Herbert Wong who performed as Tom Dong. The duo talked themselves up as "the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker of porn," a gimmick that somehow never got them the DVD cover careers they craved.
Notoriety only came when Hill was fired from his bottom-rung gig and attacked his film crew with a prop Samurai sword, killing one and wounding two others. Days later Hill was killed trying to escape capture by police.
The true story is tragic, but the film plays like a Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly comedy about delusional losers who will go to any length to never know the truth about themselves and... it probably reflects poorly on my character, but I thought it worked.
I laughed quite a bit.
Femme and
Mope are about as tonally different as they can be, but as soon as I realized that Stewart-Jarrett was the star of both films the similarities in theme stood out.
And then I found out where else I'd seen George MacKay - as Ned Kelly in Justin Kurzel's punk-rock bushman flick True History of the Kelly Gang.
Oh shit!
Now I'm picturing
Nicholas Hoult naked on a bordello couch confronting MacKay's hyper-masculine pugilist Ned with the simple question; "
Ever fuck in a dress?" And yeah,
Femme, Mope and
True History of the Kelly Gang might make for a helluva triple bill.
Side bar: 2024's been a good year for the queer crime films with
Femme currently the third holding an almost certain to make my top ten of the year slot.
Love Lies Bleeding, the sophomore feature from Rose Glass, got some attention for its bold style and stellar cast including Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone and head-turning newcomer Katy O'Brian. Stewart stars as the going-nowhere daughter of desert kingpin Harris punching the clock at a gym, one of her father's straight businesses, when O'Brian's drifter breezes into town and locks eyes with her.
First the sexual connection between the two disparate desperate souls unlocks desire for other areas in their lives, then taking action toward once stuck in static goals bursts dams of potential and a whole lot of bloodshed takes place. The closing credits sequence is fucking wonderful and makes me think this thing would play well on a double bill with
David Lynch's
Wild at Heart. I should revisit Glass's debut
Saint Maude, which I liked, but don't recall much in specific (other than the climax).
Finally, I fucking loved Ethan Coen's Drive Away Dolls, his first sans-Joel directorial effort and the first of a proposed trilogy of 'lesbian genre projects' co-written and produced with his wife Tricia Cooke. Apparently, I was in the affectionate minority of this one's audience who were perhaps appalled by the low-brow humor and cheapie-energy and style the picture wears proudly around its neck beneath the creator's high-brow Oscar crowns.
I, for one, applaud the 'getting back to my indie, made my first pictures with Sam Raimi, roots' spirit of this thing. The humor is obvious, the spirit it free-wheeling and I suspect the broad sides of barns are in peril, but my sides were split and my grin was fixed and has not faded.
Margaret Qualley's performance may recall
Nicolas Cage's in
Raising Arizona for subtlety and spirit, but she knows the assignment and is all-in on this one having nothing to prove after her turn in the equally-sexually charged, but somewhat sublimated
Denis Johnson adaptation from
Claire Denis Stars at Noon and I hope that
Geraldine Viswanathan has a third entry on the way after
Jake Szymanski's
The Package to round out a trilogy of films she stars in concerned with the recovery of a dis-embodied penis.
