The Real Deal
A Case Study of Femme (2023)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“Through borrowed clothes, repeated commands, and recorded images, Femme turns a revenge performance into a relationship—and makes the damage hurt on both sides.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. They examine the specific filmmaking mechanisms that make a work function, how those mechanisms are constructed across departments, and what another filmmaker might learn from them.
Content notice and spoiler warning: this piece discusses Femme in full, including its ending. It contains detailed discussion of a homophobic assault and slur, cocaine use, non-consensual sexual recording, sexual coercion, a knife, a broken bottle used as a weapon, and an attempted strangulation.
Getting Into Character
Getting Jules into costume takes several people. There is talc, squeezing, affectionate encouragement, and the particular comedy of friends attempting something physically unreasonable together. Jules gives as good as he gets. When Toby wishes him good luck with the traditional theatrical invitation to break a leg, Jules appreciates the phrase differently because he is wearing heels.
Before Femme presents drag as an image, it presents the work of making that image. The transformation is collaborative and conspicuously artificial, but nothing about the pleasure surrounding it feels counterfeit. Jules does not disappear when Aphrodite Banks arrives. Something he can do becomes available through her.
Written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, and performed by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay, the film will repeatedly return to that distinction. Its characters construct versions of themselves through clothing, speech, posture, sexual behavior, and the stories they tell other people. Those constructions sometimes deceive. They also create access to genuine pleasure, confidence, attachment, and change. The difficulty is that an experience becoming real does not make the circumstances producing it safe.
Onstage, Aphrodite commands an arrangement built around her. The blue dress occupies space expansively; the spotlight separates her from the surrounding darkness; the audience forms a foreground of silhouettes beneath the performance. Cinematographer James Rhodes has described the opening’s camera language as “very controlled, on Steadicam and flowing confidently throughout the environment”; once Aphrodite disappears and Jules loses his confidence, he says, “we were pretty much always handheld with a tiny bit of static.” The production establishes a visual condition that can be taken away.
The accompanying song, Shygirl’s “Cleo,” supplies an additional register. Its movie-star imagery connects desire with being watched and entering a role. Shygirl has said the song grew out of feeling “truly loved in the way I wanted to be loved,” and that it “analogises falling into a role or seeing love as a role we play in life”—an idea she traces to an image of “Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in the 1963 film.” Becoming “that starlet,” as she puts it, means “acknowledging that I’m going to be in the spotlight of your gaze and relinquish myself to it. But it’s also make-believe, because I can’t fully surrender.” That combination is particularly apt here: the performance is manufactured, but the feeling it makes possible need not be.
Outside the venue, those same visual markers become available to a different audience. Jules notices Preston across the street and acknowledges him with a small wave. Later, in the shop, Preston’s friends make Jules’s appearance a subject of public scrutiny. When Preston joins their hostility, Jules answers by bringing the earlier look into the conversation. Something Preston could leave ambiguous while standing alone is now being interpreted in front of his friends.
The confrontation therefore begins as a struggle over what an audience is allowed to understand. Preston answers that struggle with physical violence. His repeated commands dictate where Jules looks, how he positions himself, and what he wears. The clothing that friends helped Jules enter is now clothing he is forced to remove.
It is worth stating plainly what has just happened, because the film will spend the next hour complicating it: a performance staged for other men’s benefit has produced real violence against the person it was performed on. Preston’s friends are the audience he is actually answering to; Jules pays for a scene he never agreed to be in. Everything the film goes on to do with performance and control — including the moments that feel playful, or intimate, or even kind — starts here, in its ugliest form.
The cut to the wide street view changes the scale of the damage. Jules is a small, nearly naked figure at the bottom of a dark streetscape, struggling to get upright. Earlier, an elaborate costume enlarged his presence inside a frame organized for his performance. Now the frame can barely contain a trace of that commanding figure. The film has not simply shown confidence followed by injury; it has reversed the relationship between a body, its presentation, and the people watching it.
It Looks Real
Three months later, Jules is playing a video game while his friends try to persuade him to go out. Stewart-Jarrett gives the scene two simultaneous actions. Jules refuses to participate in the discussion, keeping his attention directed toward the game, while a small movement in his mouth betrays the effort required to maintain that refusal when Toby touches his shoulder. He can withhold an exchange without withholding every visible sign of feeling.
Only after the others leave does he stop playing. He dresses, takes the bus, and enters a sauna, where he encounters Preston again. The recognition travels in one direction: Jules knows whom he is looking at; Preston sees a potential sexual partner.
The film does not need clothing alone to explain that failure. Hair, makeup, setting, expectation, and the interval between encounters all participate. What matters dramatically is the difference in their knowledge. Jules can see the attacker inside the man before him. Preston cannot see the person he attacked inside Jules.
Preston’s instructions begin almost immediately. Jules must remain silent during a phone call, walk behind him, avoid being seen entering the flat, remove his shoes, close the bedroom door, and obey the terms of the sexual encounter. These are not interchangeable expressions of an aggressive personality. Together, they organize access: who may hear Jules, who may see him, and what evidence of the encounter may escape the room.
When Preston’s friends return unexpectedly, the system fails. Jules is present in clothing Preston says he cannot wear in front of them. Preston’s solution is to leave him hidden in the bedroom without a clear exit.
Jules finds another solution in the wardrobe. First comes the shirt associated with the assault, accompanied by remembered attack dialogue. Then he selects a hoodie, puts it on, and removes his jewelry. The sequence moves from an object identifying Preston to an object disguising Jules. Clothing can expose a history to one person while concealing it from another.
The transformation also changes Stewart-Jarrett’s task. Searching the room in fear gives way to selecting, adjusting, breathing, and entering. Jules has not become invulnerable. He has found something playable.
In the living room, the men accept a combination of appearance and explanation. Jules says he is collecting drugs; Preston supplies the claim that they know one another from prison. Neither piece would necessarily function independently, but together they offer a recognizable account of why this person belongs in this room. Jules escapes immediate danger by becoming somebody the group believes it understands.
MacKay’s account of developing Preston’s appearance makes a useful companion to this scene. “A huge part of the character that you actually meet in the present story came from our makeup and hair designer Marie Deehan, and our costume designer Buki Ebiesuwa,” he has said, describing a shift from an initially quieter conception—smaller tattoos, more anonymity—toward “larger tattoos, more gold watches, shorter hair.” The reasoning was that Preston’s anonymity was never going to come from blending in: “his anonymity comes from being unquestionably masculine, you know? You don’t even ask the question with Preston because he is just so tough.”
Both men are now benefiting from an appearance that directs interpretation. Preston later dismisses the borrowed hoodie as a knockoff and lets Jules keep it. Its usefulness is already established before its authenticity becomes a subject of dialogue. It has done its job because the people looking at it accepted the person it helped present.
A Table for Two
Afterward, Jules searches online for videos exposing closeted men. The view count on one of them supplies a scale unavailable to the boys filming the opening attack: millions of people can become an audience for somebody else’s humiliation. Jules’s proposed revenge takes the original injury’s combination of bodies, spectators, and recording and gives it a distribution system.
Yet the film does not immediately turn him into a confident operator. Before meeting Preston again, he struggles to leave home and conceals a kitchen knife on his body. The recording device and the knife belong to different contingencies. One anticipates what Jules might do with an image of Preston; the other anticipates what Preston might still do to Jules.
Preston’s text instructs him to dress conventionally rather than visibly queer. What follows complicates the earlier rules of concealment: Preston takes him to a restaurant. They sit across from one another in public, order food, and share a meal.
The distinction is important. Preston’s rule is not simply that nobody can see him with another man. His anxiety concerns what other people might infer from seeing them together. A costume and a plausible social context can make visibility tolerable.
Dinner also gives MacKay room to vary the behavior attached to that costume. Preston chooses food, offers to pay, jokes, and serves Jules some marrow. His authority has not vanished—he still manages much of the occasion—but it now contains gestures of attention rather than only commands. Stewart-Jarrett’s answering smile introduces an experience Jules did not need for his plan to work.
The film does not ask that smile to settle the relationship. Threat remains embedded in the conversation. Preston praises Jules’s escape from the flat while reminding him that failure would have produced a different result. Later, he supplies a description of the dangerous man Jules supposedly wants, turning his own “big man” identity into a sexual proposition.
This is where the film starts transferring its language between functions. During the attack, being the big man meant enforcing a hierarchy through violence. At dinner, Preston offers the same identity as something Jules might find desirable. The vocabulary carries its earlier history into the new setting, but the setting gives it another use.
The encounters that follow develop through repetition rather than a single declaration of changed feelings. Pickups, dinners, sex, messages, and pornography searches begin to alternate. The sound of a pornographic video continues across an image of dinner, placing the relationship and the proposed exposure inside the same audiovisual space.
The edit prevents either version from becoming self-sufficient. A scene of pleasure does not erase Jules’s objective, because the research returns. A search for humiliating footage does not erase the pleasure, because the film returns to laughter and shared meals. Freeman and Ng have described editor Selina Macarthur assembling the film during the shoot itself, checking in by phone to ask “what are you missing,” and otherwise working with the independence to tell them, in Ng’s words, “when I’m ready for you to look at it, I’ll tell you.” Freeman has framed the resulting priorities in terms close to this scene’s effect: “a lot of the edit is about bringing that tension and so much of that is about rhythm and what we see and what we don’t see.” The finished montage’s work here lies in maintaining competing meanings rather than simply abbreviating a succession of dates.
The phone provides a particularly economical means of showing Jules’s changing approach. After an unanswered message, he recruits Alicia to photograph him, selects an erotic image, and sends it to Preston. The response is immediate. Jules has discovered that constructing an image can recover attention that an ordinary request did not obtain.
Preston objects because somebody else might have seen it. The photograph works on him while violating his rules about who may look. Attraction and alarm arrive in the same phone call.
Same Again, Differently
When Preston discovers Jules trying to record him during sex, the distinction between a private encounter and a transferable image becomes explicit. He demands that the recording stop and that the footage be deleted. His objections concern his face, Jules’s intentions, and how little he knows about the person holding the camera.
The ensuing attempt at repair is uncomfortable rather than cleansing. Preston offers to replace the phone and explains his temper as a reaction to being shocked. Jules acknowledges having put him in a vulnerable position. The language briefly reverses their established arrangement without resolving the unequal knowledge underneath it: Preston is vulnerable to the camera, but he still does not know why Jules wants the image.
The next sexual encounter changes through a small, legible action. They are face-to-face. Jules asks Preston to slow down, and Preston responds.
That adjustment matters more than any general claim that the scene has become romantic. A preference is expressed and changes what happens. The body previously organized by Preston’s instructions can now communicate something Preston receives. Gentleness becomes an action between them rather than a quality the audience must infer from lighting alone.
Freeman has described intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt, “who specialises in queer sex,” as someone who “gets to choreograph with them creatively,” comparing the role to a fight coordinator’s: “intimacy coordination is a creative job and Robbie specializes in telling a story through sex and intimacy. He’s an expert in thinking about what individual moments of intimacy mean and how you tell a story through them.” That account of the work as plot-bearing rather than incidental is visible in the specificity of the finished changes: pace, orientation, touch, and response become dramatic events.
Afterward, Preston initially avoids looking at Jules. He finally meets his eyes when Jules says the encounter was nice in the end. MacKay makes accepting that assessment seem less familiar than issuing the earlier commands.
Jules nevertheless checks the surviving recording after leaving the car. The film does not grant tenderness the power to dissolve revenge on contact. Both can remain active in the same person.
His relationship with Toby supplies another distinction the central affair cannot safely make for itself. Jules refuses an attempted kiss, later repairs the friendship, and accepts physical closeness without turning it into a sexual agreement. The household scenes allow touch, humor, affection, and limits to coexist. They provide more than relief from Preston’s world; they show forms of intimacy whose meaning can be discussed without somebody threatening violence.
In the bath, Jules describes missing Aphrodite. He remembers her power and the confusing sense that she could be the real self while ordinary Jules was the performance. After the attack, he felt unworthy of her.
This is the film’s clearest warning against treating a constructed identity as a false one. Aphrodite’s artificiality was never concealed. Her value lies partly in what the construction allowed Jules to experience. Returning to her therefore cannot be reduced to resuming a disguise; it means recovering access to something he understood as his own.
Top Ten in This Room
The next visit to Preston’s flat begins as another exposure risk. His friends enter the lift with Jules, question him, and carry him into the apartment before he can arrange a private meeting. The prison story now requires details he cannot comfortably supply.
Jules redirects the conversation toward Street Fighter. It is a practical escape from interrogation, but the escape uses a skill the film has already established in a different context. Gaming, previously associated with his withdrawal from other people, becomes a means of entering a room.
His biography is fabricated. His competence is not.
As Jules wins, the scene permits enjoyment to emerge inside the deception. Stewart-Jarrett’s smile is not another line in the cover story; it accompanies an activity Jules knows how to do. The group’s response changes because he can compete, tease, and occupy its attention. Preston watches with an ease absent from their earlier attempts to hide together.
This does not prove that these men would welcome Jules with the full history and relationship revealed. It establishes something more limited and more useful: real pleasure can occur under false conditions. The lie enables the meeting without necessarily manufacturing everything experienced inside it.
The scene also begins to expose Preston to Jules’s judgment. When Oz mocks his claim to the BMW, Preston directs his correction toward Jules. Earlier, he controlled how Jules should look. Now he wants Jules to understand how he should be seen.
At the club, Oz describes deliberately provoking Preston and leaving somebody else to receive the eventual violence. His account is a boast, not an impartial psychological diagnosis, but it extends a pattern the film has shown in the group’s treatment of him. Preston’s threatening identity is not merely self-created; the surrounding men encourage it, enjoy it, and use it.
Jules begins operating inside that arrangement. He participates in the banter, remains close to Oz, and privately touches Preston while the group’s conversation continues around them. The scene splits one shared space into two simultaneous events. The friends see an ordinary night out. Preston must conceal a response to something occurring inside their field of vision.
When Jules dances with Lydia, that split becomes another performance Preston has to watch. Jules can occupy the heterosexual social picture while directing its private meaning toward the man left at the table. His ability to be read differently by different audiences has become active leverage.
Good Boy
Outside, Preston asks about the act Jules is doing. Jules answers by returning Preston’s own description of the desired “big man” to him — Preston’s own phrase from the restaurant, handed back — then follows it with the command structure Preston has used throughout their relationship. The question is no longer whether Jules will comply. It is whether Preston will.
The reversal is built from recognizable parts. Jules says “good boy,” walks away without looking back, and lets Preston follow. At home, he directs him upstairs, then calls him back to remove his shoes. In the bedroom, he stands over him and orders him to undress.
The camera and blocking participate in the transfer: Preston pressing Jules against a wall after the first visit to the flat, then Jules occupying the dominant position outside the club. Ng Choon Ping has pointed to this pairing directly: “One that we were really proud of is when Jules first comes out of the flat and Preston is pressing him against the wall. Then later on in the film, outside the club, it’s flipped and Jules is pressing Preston against the wall.” Freeman: “it always amazes me how Jules feels so much bigger in that second scene, it’s like Nathan’s grown and George has shrunk. It’s very subtle, it’s not doing anything extreme, but it physically feels different in that moment.” Ng has also described removing a flatter two-shot that would have shown the actors’ actual relative heights, “so that we always feel that Nathan is slightly smaller, if not physically then psychically”—a choice made in service of exactly the kind of reversal this scene needs.
What changes is not simply which man appears larger. Jules has learned a sequence of actions that produces a particular relationship between them, and he can now initiate it. The film makes power transferable through words, movement, position, and the expectation of obedience.
He also takes out the camera openly.
Earlier, successful recording required Preston not to notice. Here, Jules places the recording inside the sexual role, describing it as a private reminder of what Preston is with him. Preston participates with the phone visible, but the purpose Jules has previously imagined remains undisclosed. Allowing a camera into an encounter is not the same as agreeing to become material for public exposure.
The resulting portrait-format footage gives the viewer a distinct kind of image. Within the film’s wider frame, the recording can be understood as an object that could leave the room and circulate. It contains the visible face Jules has been seeking, but it also contains a kiss.
Afterward, the filmmaking leaves that transferable image and returns to the men lying together. Preston touches Jules’s face, notices the scar, and asks what happened. Jules calls it a fight. Preston offers to hurt whoever caused it.
The gesture contains tenderness without escaping the language of violence. Preston wants to protect Jules, yet the protection he proposes repeats the means by which he injured him. He is looking directly at the consequence of his own action and cannot identify it.
That failure of recognition makes the intimacy painful rather than false. Preston knows this person well enough to attend to a small mark on his forehead. He does not know enough to understand what the mark means. Jules receives the affection while holding the information that would change the encounter completely.
Breakfast, Without a Cover Story
The following morning extends Preston’s behavior beyond the sexual role Jules has directed. He wakes in a room whose images and decoration make no attempt to accommodate his public presentation. By the time Jules comes downstairs, Preston is eating breakfast with Alicia and Toby.
Jules is no longer performing membership in Preston’s household. Preston is participating in his.
The conversation gives him an ordinary ambition to explain: a clothing business, a market stall, plans to expand, and an interest in bringing smaller labels into a wider market. These details do not reveal that the threatening man was secretly somebody else all along. They give the existing man further actions and interests, while MacKay changes how he inhabits the exchange. He can be attentive, slightly awkward, and willing to answer questions without turning each one into a contest.
He also compliments Jules’s style. The man who previously issued instructions about dressing now offers approval in front of Jules’s friends.
“As Preston becomes the co-protagonist,” Rhodes has said, “he takes on the same lens logic as Jules.” He connects that shift to the film’s first daylight: the filmmakers “always wanted the story to happen at night, until the moment that everything changes… that’s the first glimpse of daylight we get—and it’s only brief. Basically, when Preston becomes a protagonist himself, we wanted to breathe for the first time.” The photography supports a development already occurring through behavior: Preston is becoming somebody whose experience the film allows us to inhabit, not only somebody Jules must interpret from outside.
The relationship is doing genuine good here. Preston is learning forms of contact that do not require him to remain the threatening figure from the beginning, and Jules is recovering movement, pleasure, and connection after his withdrawal. This is a contribution to healing, not a completed transformation. The film supplies actions to establish the growth without supplying a guarantee that either man can sustain it.
Toby’s later conversation with Preston extends that possibility while exposing its foundation. He explains his concern for Jules after the attack, then invites Preston to the birthday celebration. He wants Preston to see Jules in his own environment, but he does not know that doing so will connect identities Preston has failed to recognize.
The audience now knows more than any individual conversation contains. Toby knows the injured friend. Preston knows the person he has been seeing. Jules knows the relationship’s origin and his own intended revenge. The apparent ease of breakfast depends on those differences remaining unspoken.
Alone with the upload screen, Jules has the material his plan required. The target’s face is visible. The encounter is recorded. There is a destination for the image.
He closes the laptop.
Ng has described the revenge structure in exactly these terms: “In order for Jules to exact his revenge, he needs to infiltrate and get to know his target better. Invariably, as you get to know your target better, it humanizes them and it complicates the journey of the revenge taker.” The finished sequence gives that process a practical consequence: Jules reaches the action for which he has been preparing and does not complete it.
What he would upload is no longer emotionally separable from what happened between them. The recording can function as an instrument of humiliation, but it also preserves an encounter in which Preston accepted vulnerability and returned affection. Its possible uses have diverged without the object itself changing.
A Different Audience
Preston’s subsequent messages extend the morning’s contact. He texts about his housemates, adds a kiss, and tries again when no answer comes. The film reverses the earlier arrangement of Jules waiting for an unresponsive phone: Preston is now the person seeking reassurance through a screen.
Jules withdraws without explaining. He strips his bed and cuts the borrowed hoodie into material for Aphrodite’s return. The garment that helped conceal him among Preston’s friends becomes part of a performance that restores a visibly queer identity. Its history is not discarded; it is altered and worn.
Preston arrives at the birthday show carrying a gift. His presence has been arranged by Toby rather than Jules, a distinction essential to the scene’s pressure. Jules has not knowingly seated him in the audience for a confrontation.
Onstage, Aphrodite tells the audience about the attack and the sex tape. Declining to upload the recording has not ended Jules’s use of the experience as material. He is reclaiming the story publicly, but Preston is unexpectedly present to hear what their intimacy has become inside that telling.
For the surrounding audience, the patter can function as a performer converting injury into command. For Preston, it connects the person onstage with the person he assaulted and the person who has been sleeping beside him. Information the viewer has possessed for most of the film arrives in Preston all at once.
The sound makes that arrival physical. Speech recedes, a low rumble grows, and Preston’s breathing and scanning attention become more prominent than the act. The film does not simply show a man watching something distressing. It changes what we can hear according to his ability to receive it.
That is the culmination of the audience shift. The opening performance gave us Aphrodite’s power over a room. Her return restores that power while moving our sensory access toward somebody destabilized by it. The same performance can be reclamation for Jules and humiliation for Preston without the film reducing either response to the other.
Preston’s backstage question distinguishes remembering from recognizing. He remembers the person he attacked. What he failed to do was connect that memory with the person he subsequently desired, instructed, trusted, and cared for.
The revelation therefore changes more than his knowledge of Jules’s identity. It threatens his understanding of the relationship. Actions he experienced as attraction and intimacy are suddenly available to be reread as a sustained operation against him.
What You're Really Like
Backstage, the tension that has been building through the whole show finally breaks. Jules comes off stage still in costume; Preston is already there, unseen, sitting in the dark with a beer. His birthday wish arrives quietly enough to startle Jules outright, and the quiet does not last — humiliation, pain, and confusion come roaring out of him as anger.
Jules tries to reach the Preston he has encountered in private, appealing to the possibility that the threatening figure in front of him is not what Preston is really like. The film makes that appeal understandable without allowing it to settle the matter.
Preston has broken a bottle, blocked his exit, and threatened him. The violence is not invalidated by the tenderness Jules remembers. Nor does the violence make those remembered encounters imaginary.
The earlier command language returns with a different consequence. Silence, obedience, and bodily control have previously moved between assault and sexual role-play. Here, Preston enforces them with a weapon and the threat of lethal injury. Whatever meanings the men negotiated elsewhere cannot protect Jules in this room.
Jules says he wanted to hurt Preston but could not go through with it. His explanation shifts toward feeling sorry for him, and Preston repeats that assessment back. The exchange makes the relationship’s meaning unstable at the precise moment an explanation is most urgently needed. Compassion, pity, manipulation, shame, and attachment cannot be neatly separated by a sentence delivered under threat.
The fight that follows gives the body consequences no performance can talk away. Jules strikes when Preston’s attention moves toward the ringing phone, attempts to escape, and is caught again. Preston eventually strangles him while crying, then breaks down and collapses against him. Jules pushes him away and leaves him sobbing on the ground.
This is not a clean exchange of protagonist and antagonist. The film has redistributed our access to vulnerability, not erased responsibility for violence. Preston has become emotionally exposed, while Jules’s deception has acquired a capacity to wound him; neither development makes the original attack mutual or the final assault justified.
But it would also be inadequate to treat the climax as proof that nothing changed. The man crying on the ground is not simply restored to the emotional position from which he began. The relationship has reached him. It has also failed to undo the violent behavior through which he responds to exposure.
The growth and the danger coexist. That is the film’s most painful refusal: it does not let the audience protect the tenderness by dismissing the violence as an aberration, or protect its moral clarity by deciding the tenderness must have been fake.
For Jules, the discovery is equally devastating. He has found more than a target in Preston and has helped make another way of relating possible. He still has to get away from him. Caring has not supplied the safety that would allow him to stay.
This One
Jules walks home in the blood-marked remnants of the costume. The film returns him to the street after violence, but the repetition does not restore the opening arrangement. He has fought, escaped, and left Preston behind. He is also injured, alone, and carrying an experience that cannot be made triumphant by the fact that he survived it.
At home, the gift is waiting on his bed.
It is another hoodie, accompanied by the note: “This one’s the real deal.” The message first refers to the garment’s authenticity, recalling Preston’s dismissal of the earlier one as a knockoff. Its emotional force comes from the timing. Preston chose and brought this gift before the final attack. It is not an apology purchased afterward or an attempt to explain away what he has just done.
The two garments have acquired different histories. The counterfeit allowed Jules to move through Preston’s world under a false account of himself, then became material for Aphrodite’s return. The genuine replacement arrives as evidence that Preston remembered something they shared and wanted to give Jules something better.
Neither label can resolve the relationship. The fake garment helped create real experiences. The genuine gift comes from the same man who has just nearly killed him.
The final action belongs to Stewart-Jarrett rather than to the wording on the tag. Jules does not simply inspect the gift and put it aside. He cradles it against himself, allowing the object’s meaning to arrive through the way he holds it.
That gesture does not establish forgiveness, a wish to return, or a belief that Preston can now be trusted. It establishes a loss. The relationship began inside a revenge plan, but Jules cannot receive this evidence of affection as though affection never existed.
Femme ends with the cost of the mechanism it has spent the film constructing. Clothing made a role believable; repeated gestures made that role inhabitable; intimacy made its consequences real. None of those achievements removed the damage underneath.
Jules is still wearing the altered counterfeit when he holds the genuine replacement. One bears the violence of the night; the other carries a tenderness that preceded it.
The film leaves him holding both.
Version Note: Viewing copy: Amazon Prime Video digital presentation, runtime as displayed 1:38:39. Directors: Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. Screenplay: Freeman and Ng, expanded from their own 2021 short film of the same name (18 minutes, starring Paapa Essiedu and Harris Dickinson; winner, Best Short Film, BIFA 2021; nominated, BAFTA Film Award for British Short Film, 2022 ceremony). Department credits drawn on in this piece: Cinematography, James Rhodes; Editor, Selina Macarthur; Costume Design, Buki Ebiesuwa; Make-Up & Hair Design, Marie Deehan.
A Note on Sourcing: Evidence in this piece follows a five-tier hierarchy: released work (direct viewing) is the strongest evidence; then documented production fact (credits, technical records, attributed accounts of the shoot); then filmmaker commentary; then performer/participant commentary; then Atlantis’s own interpretation. Filmmaker- or performer-stated intent is not, on its own, proof of what the finished film achieves — where this piece cites an interview, it is citing a stated intent or an account of process, not evidence that the intent landed on screen; the achievement claim itself rests on the viewing record.
Terms and formulations used in this essay’s argument that are Atlantis’s own framing, not the filmmakers’: “the mechanism” (performance producing authentic consequences), “the reversal” (as applied to the club/bedroom sequence), and the reading of the closing hoodie as “object history.” The title, “The Real Deal,” is drawn directly from the film’s own on-screen text (Preston’s gift note) rather than coined by Atlantis.
Sources and Research
- Berlinale official programme page (berlinale.de).
- Wikipedia, Femme (film).
- Screen Daily, feature interview with Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.
- BIFA 2023 winners announcement (bifa.film).
- Box Office Mojo.
- Rotten Tomatoes.
- Metacritic.
- PinkNews (thepinknews.com), trailer-coverage article, quoting director Sam H. Freeman.
- British Cinematographer (britishcinematographer.co.uk), “James Rhodes / Femme.”
- Frieze (frieze.com), “Shygirl: How to Write a Love Song.”
- Film Updates (filmupdates.net), interview with Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay.
- Directors Notes (directorsnotes.com), interview with Ng Choon Ping and Sam H. Freeman.
- Definition Magazine (definitionmagazine.com), “Lens Logic: Femme.”
- Film Updates (filmupdates.net), interview with Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.