Day 44: The Red Shoes (1948)

For some, dancing is life. There is nothing else and, even if there were, there’s no room left in their soul for it. It is an exhausting, full bodied profession that usually takes more out of a performer than it gives back. To put simply- dancing is a cruel mistress.

A few years back, I dated a dancer and, from first hand experience, it is certianly the most physcially taxing of all the arts. One false move can break a bone, strain a muscle, or even end a career. It is because of this that the art of ballet, in particular, is so emotionally draining. You are not only dancing your heart out and balancing on a tight wire of athletisism, but also portraying a charater that the audience must connect to. You must be internal to dance and external to perform- a dicotomy, which can rip some apart.

To do such a fierce task, one must devote their entire being to the art even, at times, when life itself passes you by. It is this struggle that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger so wonderfully tackle in “The Red Shoes,” a film as beautiful as its story is engrossing.

In the film, we get a “behind the curtain” look of a ballet company run by the ruthless yet passionte impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who sees a new creative direction for his work when he meets Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a brilliant though inexperienced dancer. Though there is work to be done if she is ever to be a star, Boris sees an honesty in Victoria’s dancing that he simply cannot shake and soon puts his whole soul into her starring performance in the company’s new ballet based on Hans Christian Anderson’s ”The Red Shoes.”

But, as Victoria gains fame for her dancing and starts on a path to becoming a legend, Boris recieves a severe blow when he is informed that his prized dancer has fallen in love with Julian Craster (Marius Goring), the company’s composer and conductor. Boris believes this affair will ruin Victoria’s career as her life should not have room for both dancing and love and he fires Craster on the spot, hopefully ending the relationship. But this is not the case and, stricken with love for Julian, Victoria follows him out of the company and out of Boris’s grasp. Now without his muse, Boris finds his artistic creativity and his career in jeopardy and his company without a vibrant star, leading him on a struggle to bring Victoria back to dance “The Red Shoes” once again.

A magnificant undertaking, “The Red Shoes” is a film that speaks closest to artists, who understand how impossible it can be to give everything to your work as well as live a normal life. It is this constant battle emodied through Victoria, as the artist, Boris, as the desire for art, and Julian, as the need for life, that creates one of the most interesting “love triangles” in cinema. For, throughout the film, Victoria is being pulled by these opposing “loves,” each giving her something wonderful, but only by canceling out the other. At one point in the film, Boris says, “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer. Never.” and it’s this idea which is at the heart of the film. Can one truly represent the beauty of the imagination if weighed down by the pleasures of reality?

To answer this question, the film delievers an incredible act of foreshadowing by playing out Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Red Shoes” in the ballet. As Anderson’s story goes, a young woman is offered a pair of beautiful red shoes by a demonic shoemaker and she accepts them happily, unaware that once she begins to dance she cannot stop. Soon her feet take complete control of her life and the woman loses all she loves to the shoes, who never let her stop dancing until her death.

This fairy tale runs as a very omnious analogy for the events in the film, especially if the red shoes represent the need to dance. In the end of the film, Victoria finds herself at a crossroads between her loves and, in the end, much like in the story, it is the red shoes that figurtivily and, in some ways, literally, bring about her demise.

“The Red Shoes” is one of the finest films I have watch during “The Criterion Summer” as it’s beautiful cinematography perfectly captures both the harsh reality and the beautiful fairy tale like grandure of ballet and the artists who live and die by it.

To learn more about “The Red Shoes,” check out Criteron’s page here.

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