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Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Written by Powell and Pressburger
Staring Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Robert Helpmann
U.K., 1948
Not Rated (appropriate for older children)
There are some major spoilers here. Beware!
THE RELIGION OF ART
The story of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film, The Red Shoes, is the kind of kitschy, pulpy melodrama that makes for great romance and tragedy. It works, and it’s terribly moving. Victoria Page (Moira Shearer in her film debut), an English ballerina, and Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a young composer, are welcomed into the famous Lermontov ballet company. Vicky is ambitious and Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), a frightful impresario who treats ballet like a religion, is obsessed with turning her into the greatest dancer in the world. After she has achieved a certain amount of fame and popularity, she falls in love with Julian, to the anger of her mentor. This all sandwiches one of the most exhilarating sequences in all of cinematic dance, "The Ballet of The Red Shoes," based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.
One could enjoy the film for its color alone, which is the first thing that strikes the viewer. Jack Cardiff’s bursting Technicolor cinematography must be one of the most beautiful things ever captured on film; the movie is so giddily fantastical, it seems the celluloid has been soaked in sugar water and caffeine. (The novel that Powell and Pressburger later wrote, adapted from their film, was full of wonderfully detailed British poetics, but could not capture an iota of the film’s enchantment, because the charm of The Red Shoes is quite visual.) A world is created here- the glamorous suffering and triumph of a ballet company- and it is just as our fantasies have played; certainly the dancers work mind- and body-numbing hours, but everything is poured with honey, so even the pain is perfect.
There is a sense of family about Lermontov’s company. He is the father, and all his children are the most adoring of siblings. This can be compared to the famous, decades-long partnership of Powell and Pressburger, or the family-like bond between a cast and a crew making any movie. When ballerina Boronskaja (played by Ludmilla Tcherina, who is strangely exotic and a lot of fun with that thick, curling French accent) declares she is getting married, Lermontov feels betrayed because the balance of his family has been disturbed, and he will later feel this way about the romance between Julian and Vicky, two of his company’s greatest assets.
Lermontov is a determined, obsessive man who plants talent and loves to watch his garden grow. His relationships are exercises in power. Anton Walbrook plays him as a handsome, distinguished villain/hero with a cane, sunglasses, and a hat. He is easily threatened, but his vigor and animalistic passion is like that of some movie directors and like the race of Louis B. Mayers in the studio era. He’s protective yet only as long as you acknowledge that he is the potter and you are the clay.
Ballet is portrayed here as a world of persuasion. It is Vicky’s aunt who invites Lermontov, the god of the ballet kingdom, to a party to sneak in a surprise audition for her talented niece. Lermontov lures Julian into the ballet company, even when the realm of music lovers (like Julian) and the realm of balletomanes (like Lermontov) are light years apart in this era. After Vicky leaves the company when Julian is fired, Lermontov gropes about to convince his premier ballerina that she belongs with him, so he can mold her into what his and her ambition yearn for. Just like an artist must hit the right emotional chords with an audience, these artists must also persuade by hitting the right notes. It seems the inhabitants of this dreamy world must ceaselessly climb up (or, in Lermontov’s case, down) a ladder to be successful. Love cannot enter the equation of stardom, and so Vicky must choose between her career or her lover, between the life of a housewife and the life of a star, because she simply isn’t allowed to juggle both.
The story of Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Red Shoes" is well-known. Powell and Pressburger strip it down to a basic form so they can stuff it with stunning visuals in the film’s center piece. The sequence was, to my knowledge, the first time a narrative film actually stopped a story to insert a good twenty minutes of music and dance. It was later done in Minelli and Kelly’s An American In Paris, with a lesser effect. The ballet is also seen from a dancer’s point of view, not the audiences, because this movie, after all, is about the ballerina’s fantasy of the art she is giving birth to. This reminds me of the strategy Ingmar Bergman used to film his opera movie, The Magic Flute. The influence of this dance sequence has encompassed many works of the last half of the twentieth century, including the films of Martin Scorsese (who ranks this film among his top five).
The original story of "The Red Shoes" goes something like this: a girl falls in love with a pair of red shoes and gets her blind guardian to buy them for her. She blasphemously wears them to church, and cannot stop dancing because the shoes keep her in perpetual motion. Her feet are eventually cut off and she is made wooden feet by an executioner and is accepted back into society. Powell and Pressburger’s version is a tad simpler: a girl falls in love with a pair of red shoes, dances the night away, is unreachable by all she loves, and is killed by her shoes which keep her dancing until she dies.
"The Ballet of The Red Shoes" is certainly one of the most breathtaking and compelling sequences ever filmed, and Moira Shearer prances, slides, and pirouettes through a mist of numerous Hein Heckroth and Arthur Lawson sets that may be the epitome of Technicolor eye-candy. Not one word is said throughout, but the sequence is so beautifully handled that I was never squirmish. The production design is cotton candy meets Carnival of the Souls. The scenes are like an ornate puppet show, and things are accomplished here that could never be done in a stage ballet, like a newspaper becoming a dancer and then transforming into a newspaper again. There’s a little bit of everything in the architecture of the sets and look of the sequence, which were first put into drawings: there’s some Van Gogh in the starry, starry sky; women on the streets look like demon mermaids right out of Andersen’s own "The Little Mermaid"; there’s a minimalist set; one door has a most intriguing cobweb design; one set is a ballroom with golden drapes; and there’s even a slight trace of Incan architecture. The fine choreography by Robert Helpmann is playful, lively, and desperate, streaked with the doom of the Andersen story. It seems to me that ballet is a way of expressing the fire of life with a heavenly grace.
Vicky may or may not realize that dancing "The Ballet of The Red Shoes" is dancing her fate. In the end, life imitates art. Vicky is pulled violently in two direction- by her career and her love- and her salvation and escapism, her dancing, whirls her off a building and into a train zooming by. It is an eerily inevitable ending that puts The Red Shoes into the domain of classical tragedy. The movie’s plot becomes the realistic realization of the metaphorical fable it surrounds. Powell and Pressburger have expressed the glamour of the pain of art; in one scene, Vicky ascends a mystical, weed-infested staircase in Monte Carlo for a meeting with Lermontov like a princess in a long, draping dress, only to descend in the finale from the top of a theater in the costume of her character, and become her character. She resembles a doll with a blue ribbon in her hair, a creamy dress, and pale, Kabuki-like make-up, and when she dies, she asks Julian to take the red shoes off. The film is so imaginary that even death is made to symmetrically correlate with art and the romance of ballet. In its finale, The Red Shoes retains the gory, spooky Freudian-misogynist-mysticism that makes Andersen’s tales, especially "The Red Shoes," haunting.
The Red Shoes is a tale of the religion of art. For Lermontov, the art of others is his power, and when that disintegrates, his self-admiration turns into selfish, brutish masochism. In one scene, Julian wakes up in the middle of the night after he has been fired, and starts to play the piano. Not one word is spoken, but he communicates with Vicky through his art. The popular art of movie tragedy is combined with the somewhat elite art of ballet here, and it’s a great mix. But in all this artsiness, The Red Shoes goes back to the original art of film- silence. Many of the techniques used here are from the silent era, like the manipulation of time. The Red Shoes becomes a blithe celebration of this religion, with the suave antagonism of Anton Walbrook and the red, bristly hair of Moira Shearer. At the Berlin Film Festival premiere, Michael Powell wrote a message to be read at the screening, saying "art is worth dying for." After seeing the utter beauty of this movie, I’d disagree. It is worth living for.
By Andrew Chan
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