FILM CLUB - The Red Shoes

Powell & Pressburger Film - 1948 

The Red Shoes is still considered today as the finest film about dance made. It appears to be such a simple, yet tragic, tale about the conflict between the desire to dance and the desire for love. From the perspective of 2023 its easy to not realise quite how groundbreaking a movie The Red Shoes was. For a start, it created a whole sub genre of the psychological horror ballet story.  Black Swan from 2010, being the most recent reworked twist on this. 

Powell and Pressburger devotes the central chunk of this movie to the entire Red Shoes ballet, a seventeen minute long sequence. Choosing not to film it as though viewed through a proscenium arch, it employs a whole magic bag of visual tricks that are simultaneously interweaving cinematically the emotional conflicts of Vicky Page ( Moira Shearer ) into it. For this is the most metaphorical of all movies, multiple layers of allusions.

It opens at the premier of Heart of Fire, a new ballet. Julian Craster ( Marius Goering ) a music student, recognises the music as being his, that his tutor has lifted its musical themes completely.  He meets with Lermontov ( Anton Walbrook ) the company's svengali to expose the whole charade. He ends up employed to write music for a new ballet based on a Hans Christian Anderson story. The Red Shoes is about a shoe maker who makes a pair of scarlet red ballet shoes. These are enchanted and allow him to manipulate whoever wears them. Forcing them to dance and dance unto death. 

Reflecting this fantastically grim tale of obsessive control. Lermontov demands all his leading female dancers be completely devoted to a life of dance, only then can he assuredly form them into something truly great. For him dance is a religion. If a dancer deigns to get married, he sacks them. Lermontov is an archetype of the male who must have complete creative mastery over the feminine. Once he takes possession they must dance and dance and dance, for him alone. A sublimated love inhabits him. He needs Page to be entirely dependent upon him. 

When he discovers Craster and Page are in a relationship, he responds by attempting to ruin both their careers. He coerces Page, she has to choose, its either her dancing career or her lover, she cannot have both. This emotional division proves impossible to hold. She resolves it by throwing herself off a balcony onto the rail road beneath. Damaging her body and ability to dance beyond repair. The last we hear is Page's request to Craster to remove her bloodied red ballet shoes from her feet. An echo from the end of the ballet sequence.

This film fable fizzes with an intoxicated, and intoxicating, energy. Powell and Pressburger throw everything they've got at the screen. You can see the exuberance of their creativity spilling out. Its there in its endless jump cuts, overlays, swinging and swooping camera work. The style is expressionistic, all stretched shadows and exaggerated gestural movements of bodies and film. The richness of its sumptuous technicolour colour palette being mirrored in its musical score. In the way the visual image of ocean waves lapping and breaking over the stage become the audience's applause. Its romantic passion is undeniably written large across its mise en scene. 

Everyone else in the movie has scant realistic agency of their own, they are all to some extent pawns or cyphers for the underlying folklore. For as with most Powell and Pressburger movies, this is no sweet sickly form of romance, it is dark, with menacingly sharp edges. It's a morality tale with echoes of Greek mythology. For whenever humans act as if they are close to being gods, their fall back to earth is inevitable and fatal.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8