US writer/director Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men) is a provocateur. Not quite in the same way as Denmark’s Lars Von Trier perhaps, but still a director who occasionally likes to push similar buttons in unsuspecting audiences.

In particular they like to pick at the scab of political correctness that has formed over society’s view of relations between men and women. Part of this theme used to be deemed the ‘battle of the sexes’ but that is too cute for La Bute’s retro but knowingly postmodern view. You sense that LaBute is deliberately playing on past language and attitudes to point up how things probably haven’t changed underneath all the current orthodoxies.

It is a taut, short and spiky two-hander extremely well acted by Stanley Tucci (Margin Call) and Alice Eve (Star Trek Into Darkness). You can see why actors would be attracted to it. Although the whole thing feels at times like filmed play there is plenty of juicy dialogue to relish. The rather static filming and the virtual absence of a music score isolates the dialogue even more.

Eve is the less convincing of the two but that is not a strong criticism as, in Tucci, she is up against one of the most versatile character actors in Hollywood today. He is also a great technician able to deliver the sometimes stagey lines with convincing fluency and force.

The setting is deliberately ambiguous; somewhere between domesticity and something more like a flirtatious office party encounter. The plot is minimal. A man Fred (Tucci) arrives at a woman’s door. She is the eponymous Velvet (Eve), a well turned out blonde in a startling red dress. Is she pleased to see him? We can’t be sure. Why do they start arguing almost as soon as the hello warmth has worn off? The rest of Some Velvet Morning is a cat and mouse game really.

As suggested above, the flow of the dialogue has plenty of emotional peaks and troughs. They row they make up, they row again. It is all a bit like real life really but there is something else underneath, something we can’t quite name. That is enough to rescue it and to ensure that part of it lodges in the back of your mind.

// JULIAN WOOD