Review: Red is the Color of

Seduction is the name of the game in Red is the Color of, the feature writing and directorial debut by Anne Norda. The film, which recently won Best Feature Film at the La Femme Film Festival, spins a tantalizing tale about a love triangle involving a husband and wife, both artists, and the husband's model, a sexy, manipulative young woman who plays head games with both of them.

Mary Shaw (Irina Björklund) is a successful artist known for painting with her own blood; her art has spawned a cult of followers who call themselves the "Bloody Marys," who have an unsettling habit of stalking Mary outside her studio and her home. Her husband, David Stellar (Peter Franzen) is also an artist, albeit a less successful one. And like a lot of marriages where the wife is more successful than the husband, David's unspoken, perhaps unacknowledged (even to himself) resentment of his wife succeeding while he struggles forms a powerful undercurrent beneath the surface of their marriage that's threatening its very foundation, although neither of them have yet realized it.

As can sometimes happen when once-happy marriages start to hit roadblocks that threaten their serenity and stability, an outside force comes along to shake things up ... in this case, in the form of Julie (Eliza Pryor Nagel), a blond beauty who looks the picture of innocence, but is really anything but. Julie has her own motivations for playing with Mary and David's marriage, and none of them have anything to do with keeping the couple intact. Julie begins her game with subtle flirting with David, which grows increasingly not-so-subtle over time. David's loyalty to his wife and his attraction to Julie are dueling contradictory forces within him; once David is caught her her spell, Julie ups the stakes by flirting with Mary.

It's pretty obvious right from the first start that things are not likely to end well here, but we don't know exactly in which way they're going to go badly. Will Julie be successful in her seduction of David, or will he prove to be loyal to his lovely, unsuspecting wife? Will Julie, preying on Mary's insecurties and weaknesses with wine and flattery, persuade the heterosexual artist to take a walk on the bi side? There are a limited number of possible ways the cards might fall here, but it's nonetheless an enjoyable ride finding out how it all goes down. Added to the mix is Fran Pinkerton, an ardent fan (and president of the Bloody Marys fan club) who is herself a rather disturbed artist .

When Mary encourages Fran to persue her art, the film starts to edge into All About Eve territory ... Mary is experiencing a downturn, the gallery that reps her needs some fresh blood (both literally and figuratively), and there's Fran, all ready to step into Mary's shoes and copy her work. Fran is both fragile and quite possibly a nutcase -- for starters, she's a diabetic who gets off on eating sugar to bring herself almost to the edge of death -- and we're not sure if just how much potential there is for her passionate adoration of Mary to turn sinister. Meanwhile Julie, with her oh-so-innocent wide-eyed stare, looks like an ingenue, but she's playing her own games as well.

The script is pretty well-written -- it almost feels like a tightly wound stage play, with the focus primarily on the three main characters. The direction is smooth as well -- there's a particular scene that stood out for me where the dialog, acting, and taut direction combine to masterfully manipulate our emotions within the space of a few minutes: Julie's flirtation brings David dangerously close to the edge of infidelity, and the closer he walks the line, the more our tension increases. Mary walks in unexpectedly, breaking the tension, and we feel, along with David, his sense of relief in having not given in to Julie -- if he had, Mary would have walked in right in the middle of things, and he'd have been busted. At the same time, we feel the weight of David's subconscious guilt for being powerfully attracted to someone who's not his wife ... and Julie's anger and disappointment in having her game temporarily thwarted.

Julie, ever the masterful manipulator, skillfully maneuvers the conversation to try to keep the attention focused on herself, but when she asks Mary to tell her how she and David met, it's David who chimes in, and as he recounts the story of meeting his wife for the first time, we see him get lost in the telling, feel him reliving that moment again as he looks at his wife with real appreciation for the first time since we entered their lives ... and we get a sense for the real love and passion that this couple once shared, that's somehow gotten lost along the way. Julie senses it too, and she doesn't like David focusing on Mary that way, but her spell has been broken ... this time.

Infidelity (or the threat of infidelity to a marriage) is a powerful topic for a drama, and the three leads do a really solid job in creating a palpable sense of tension throughout the film. These kind of, "will the guy give in to the temptation of a beautiful woman" films can be simplistic and melodramatic, or even plain annoying -- Zach Braff's The Last Kiss made me just want to smack Braff's cheating guy right through the screen -- but Red is the Color of manages to transcend the "guys are just pigs" mentality that permeates so many of these films by giving David more a bit more depth than the husband usually has in these tales. After its win at La Femme, I'll be interested to see how Red is the Color of does on the fest circuit ... keep an eye out for it coming to a fest near you.