Red Velvet * * * *
With the popularity of film's like Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive or Christopher Nolan's... well anything, the "film-noir" is cinematically in vogue. A staple of all great noir conspicuously absent from many "neo-noirs" of late is the femme fatal: the beautiful, mysterious, powerful woman who lets noir's men think they hold a good set of cards when she in fact holds the whole deck. With DePalma-esque eroticism, Aude Cuenod's masterful genre short Red Velvet not only finds noir's seemingly lost femme fatale, but its small cast of essentially three is almost entirely made up of women (subverting the genre's archaic gender dynamics in much the same way the Wachowski's Bound did).
