Femme (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

Possibly the most frustrating and challenging movie of the year (technically it was released in Britain in late 2023, but it wasn't available in the US until 2024), Femme has haunted my waking mind since entering my unsuspecting eyeballs. I've watched it three times already and still it plays hard-to-get, like a peripatetic snowflake in a warm updraft. With erotic thrillers, sometimes we get what we expect and want: satisfying sex that turns into a domestic or romantic nightmare. Sometimes we get what we need out of what we expect: taboo sex that doesn't punish its participants beyond what they can handle and they (and we) grow from it (see Babygirl, also out in 2024). And then there are those complex little puzzle boxes that break open several taboo seals while offering insight that refuses to moralize or condemn, forcing us to engage in a wholly different way. This is Femme. 

Opening with what could be a less glamorous spin-off of Pose across the pond, Femme refers to entertainer Jules, a tall, thin, Black man who performs as a beautiful drag queen in East London. One night, after performing, he goes out to the alley for a smoke and notices a rather butch white guy checking him out, who quickly flees. Going down the block for a new pack, Jules encounters this stranger again in the midst of a small gang of ruffians, crudely mocking and threatening Jules in the store. Jules responds to their homophobic slurs by mentioning the one who checked him out, which leads to him violently and brutally assaulting Jules in the alley while one of his friends records it online. It would seem that this fag has been roundly smoked.

The film skips ahead three months, as Jules recovers in ways that are surely not healthy but that are distinctly recognizable in a post-Covid world. He's become reclusive, rarely leaving his apartment, much to the concern and consternation of his beloved friends Toby and Alicia; he wears baggy, more "masc" clothes, uses no makeup, leaves his hair in a messy updo, and acts more stereotypically masculine even in the privacy of his own home while playing video games to no end. But, prompted by his friends to go out and try living, Jules takes a venture to a bathhouse. It's worth noting here that someone outside of the queer community may not understand or appreciate Jules's actions for the early parts of this film, which doesn't waste its time on explanations or exposition; you really just have to take it for what it is and, if something doesn't quite make sense to you, ask a queer person about it later. Bathhouses (or any queer spaces) are not innately threatening or scary places, so let's do away with those judgment calls, okay?

Lo and behold, Jules encounters, quite by chance, the same man who attacked him. In the bathhouse. He's still clearly a live wire, swinging more slurs until he leaves. Jules follows him into the locker room, where they make eyes at each other. Then the man orders Jules to continue following him outside. It's a riveting sequence, a bizarre roulette game of body language and tumultuous emotional charges, especially for Jules, who seems to think that this man doesn't recognize him from three months prior, but still isn't sure if he's going to attack again or on what grounds. But Jules also sees an opportunity here, unclear at first if it's for an adrenaline rush or proof of self-reliance or something more sinister; it doesn't take long before we see Jules plotting his revenge.

Written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, Femme takes most of its time exploring the fraught dynamics between Jules and his attacker, Preston, because indeed the white boy gets hooked by Jules's savvy demeanor, submissive bent, and of course his beauty. Their dynamic is innately perilous, as Preston's gang of criminal young men are about as toxically masculine imaginable and the closeted Preston is terrified of anyone discovering his proclivities. Unfortunately, that means Preston tends to lash out at anyone questioning his social dominance or implying any fruit in his cake, so to speak. But, in developing a relationship with Jules, Preston begins to change. It scares him. It should scare Jules, too, who moves rather quickly to force certain plot points to happen before Preston is fully aware of himself.

It's all a delicate and dangerous dance, so thankfully these filmmakers have two incredible actors to feature. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett carries the film with remarkably deft technique, naturalizing the mannerisms of his character in endlessly believable ways to the extent that I occasionally forgot this wasn't a documentary and Jules isn't a real person. George MacKay, on the other hand, is more recognizable to me, but his characterization of Preston is brave and insightful to the extent that, while watching, I started getting flashbacks to people who have bullied me because of the ways they bully themselves. The film is a character case study, and these actors deserve accolades for their performances.

But the filmmakers deserve them, too, and rarely are films with such topical and specific content this beautifully crafted or this challenging to experience. Slick and grungy at the same time, stylish and tense, the lighting and cinematography (James Rhodes) push us into realms of a somewhat surreal demimonde, awash in vibrant club colors and the intimacy of a warm candlelit bath, always visually representing Jules's emotional and spiritual state. Femme takes a fresh, hard look at violence against queer folks and boldly imagines a fantasy in which vengeance is not only possible but almost too easy. But this isn't quite Promising Young Woman, and I don't think Jules's characterization in particular allows us to view any character as a stock type, especially not an avenging angel. Can two wrongs make a right? This film sidesteps such moralizing, preferring to pose more questions about how hatred and violence and passion and love and sex combine into a heady cocktail of moral ambivalence and dangerous liaisons. If I had a complaint about the movie, it would be that the film only concerns itself with queer pain rather than queer joy, but that assessment says more about me than the film as it also ignores the elements of the film that are, in some ways, joyful and affirming. And, in case you're confused by my meandering, be aware that the conclusion of this film is so unexpected and raw that it will also upset your ability to glean easy meaning.

1917 (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

My friend and I, after seeing 1917, were musing on comparable war films. I tend to inexplicably prefer the genre, and even I had trouble recalling other WWI movies. I guess there's War Horse, and of course All Quiet on the Western Front; later I remembered A Farewell to Arms and Kubrick's Paths of Glory. But there aren't a lot, especially when compared to the perennial WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq war movies. As we considered why, we came up with two solid answers: first, Americans weren't nearly as involved in that war (Wilson was determined to remain neutral until the Lusitania sank, and US troops were deployed in only the last year of the four-year conflict), and it was a particularly brutal fight.

The brutality and isolation of WWI take central focus in Sam Mendes's vision of trench warfare, which he and cinematographer Roger Deakins capture in two individual, almost unbroken shots. At least, so it's meant to appear, as Hitchcock and Inarritu have notably done before. Initially, I expected that this single-shot approach would prove the unbelievable technical achievements of these artists; it does. Then I suspected that this technique would pull us into the story with immersive and devastating results; it does. Finally, I realized that this feature was not so much a technical gimmick as it was a theatrical and artistic expression of integrity. This is one of the rare stories in which the expense of time is in fact deadly -- the tagline of some ads reads "Time is the enemy" -- and so as the bloody fighting increases in intensity, so does the thematic anxiety we feel as we watch.

The German army has withdrawn from a section of the Western Front. The British and French soldiers are on a watchful rest, but only just. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), two young soldiers, are woken and ordered to travel to another battalion, across enemy lines, to prevent their attack. The German retreat is a ruse, and the British attack will result in thousands of their own casualties, including Blake's brother (Richard Madden). Blake and Schofield embark, first exiting their own trench to immediately see, probably for the first time, the horrific hell on earth that is the recently deserted battlefield. Making their way through the muddy, bloody no-man's land and into the deserted German trenches is a nail-biting exercise in tension. And it's just the first step.

Because of the immediacy and immersion of the film, it often feels like a sort of arthouse video game, where you play a character picking his way across various battlefields, including tunnels, trenches, rivers, forests, fields, abandoned towns. The journey and action are punctuated by terrifying open-world dangers, especially gunfire that tends to erupt when least expected from shooters we never see. Occasional reprieves take the form of lengthy bits of exposition-heavy dialogue, either between the two young men or various commanding officers, including Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The centerpiece, though, is a masterwork of light, sound, speed, and acting as Schofield sprints through a ruined town with Germans hunting him in the dark. Flares flying overhead turn the battlefront into a nightmarish ghost-town where shadows move and nothing is as it seems.

In what quickly becomes a sort of odyssey through war-torn northern France, the two young men are forced to deal with booby traps, enemy soldiers, friendly fire, dehydration, airplane attacks, rats, barbed wire, tunnel collapses, and hundreds of dead bodies. Not long after they initially enter no-man's land, Schofield cuts his hand on barbed wire and then, spooked and hiding, accidentally plunges his hand into a festering corpse's bowels. It's disgusting, and he'll probably lose that hand within a week, but it's just the beginning of the horrors to come. The action is relatively slow-paced, but so much detail and emotion is built into every minute that you still feel like things are flying along. In fact, lengthy sections feel not unlike Apocalypse Now in that, despite our protagonists' best efforts to find and deliver information, the battlefield is strewn with soldiers who have effectively lost their minds. Nobody knows where the command is, where the front is, who is a threat and who is a friend, or even how to function as a normal person. Madness is the cost these men pay to serve in war, if not their limbs or lives.

Ophelia (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

The movie begins with the iconic image of the helpless, doomed mad girl, drowning while floating in the river. But, in voiceover from actress Daisy Ridley, the Ophelia of this film tells us we'll hear a different story: her story. Helped by a smart script and a great ensemble, Ophelia reimagines Shakespeare's Hamlet to tell the story of the misunderstood love interest who became a casualty to patriarchal strife. Though it's no work of artistic genius, the film works hard to make a case for its heroine, allowing her intelligence, gumption, and wit to give her the agency to change Denmark, but to escape the slaughter unscathed.

Anyone who finds Hamlet (the character) dramatically inert will be happy to know this story moves along at a faster pace, thanks to the agency exhibited by Ophelia. The film begins with the young girl making a witty first impression on Queen Gertrude, who is impressed enough to grant the child a place in her entourage. In a screenplay that will invariably be scrutinized next to Shakespeare's original language -- of which this film shares none -- it's pretty remarkable that writer Semi Chellas didn't even try to piggyback, instead crafting a tone and rhythm all her own. This dialogue is riddled with wordplay but keeps itself familiar and relevant, as if determined to empower young literary minds when screened in high school English classes.

But be warned that this is not a simple retelling from a different perspective. This story includes multiple episodes utterly absent from Hamlet, though arguably they indicate an odd attempt to contextualize this tale within a nonexistent Shakespearean fictional universe. The big change comes in the form of a witch, played by Naomi Watts, for whom Ophelia is courier of a magic potion for Queen Gertrude (also Naomi Watts); it seems the queen is so desperate to hang on to her own youth and beauty that she will resort to magic and, yes, the love of a husband's brother in order to maintain it. This complication of her character could be read as making her more complicit in the rottenness of Elsinore. Magic mirror on the wall, and so forth.

While Ophelia and Gertrude are stealing our attention, it's important to note that Hamlet and Claudius have important -- and importantly diminished -- roles as well. Claudius is veritably creepy here, clearly dangerous and wicked, whereas the original flirts with his ambiguity for the play's first two acts. Hamlet, though, is a dutiful and often romanticized character, and their affair turns into a sort of Danish Romeo and Juliet situation; he effectively sacrifices himself to cleanse the castle, while Ophelia escapes the madness alone and finally free. They plan their takedown of Elsinore early on, making even Hamlet's nunnery speech into a coded plea for her to escape while she can. In rewritten moments like this, the film especially shines.

And even if you're not here for the gendered politics (shame on you!), the film boasts enough eye-popping, sumptuous costume drama to keep you enthralled. Plus, we've got some gorgeous location cinematography and sound mixing that bring a haunting duality to the warm, sunlit outdoors and the echoing, chilly castle interior. There's not much not to like about all this, though I found myself wanting a bit more of just about everything.