Cast: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook

Director: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Screenplay: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Running time: 2 hr 16 mins

Genre: Drama/Dance



CRITIQUE:


Fashioned during a period when the European vogue centred on Italian neorealism and the Hollywood trend lavished in gangster noirs, British film The Red Shoes begged to differ. Legendary filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger of the Black Narcissus fame indulge in the power of theatre, ballet, sumptuous sets and gorgeous artifice to convey a scintillating kind of cinema. In other words, sod to the rest of the world. They were comfortable in their own art. That is not to say the deliberate aestheticism is without a point: its Technicolour cinematography (courtesy of another legend behind the lens, Jack Cardiff), sound, light and design are employed to astonishing effect, enhancing the film’s emotional intensity. Half a century onwards, now canonised by latter-day movie pontiffs Scorcese and Coppola, and recently celebrated its digital restoration at Cannes this year – it only shows that none of the decades past had dulled its luminous sparkle. This dark, beautiful and tragic Hans Christian Andersen-inspired fairy tale of a ballerina doomed to dance forever until her death will remain to be one of the finest things ever committed to celluloid.


Structured as a story-within-a-story, this is not only about the fairy tale heroine’s ill-omened dance when she acquires the titular ballet shoes from a sinister shoemaker. Anyone who had seen it would recognise this as a metaphor to the bigger picture of its story, which is really about the aspiring ballerina Victoria Page and her crisis between love and ambition, tortured between her romantic yearning and her impresario’s cruel, despotic grip to achieve glory. On paper it appears to be a simple story, but it achieves stunning complexity through its characters: Moira Shearer’s Page could easily quit her job and dance somewhere else, but to renounce an ambition and artistic desire proves to be the hardest choice, and Anton Walbrook’s calculating, slippery theatre mogul Boris Lermontov offers the summit of her career whilst furtively impinging his own desire for Page. A high passion for the art, music, visuals and storytelling may be taken for overindulgence by those less imaginative, but there’s no denying The Red Shoes’ spectacular authority in filmmaking. Seen through its many meticulously composed scenes, in particular that unbroken 20-minute ballet sequence where the stage dissolves into an exquisitely stylised netherworld, where the ballerina flashes her blood-coloured dancing shoes through an assemblage of deeply expressionistic, often surrealistic and nightmarish images, illusions and dream sequences. There’s not a better way to perfectly capture the heroine’s inner torment and the imminent tragedy looming on the horizon.


VERDICT:

A one-of-a-kind, bravura feat of filmmaking. Exquisitely performed, exceptionally framed from start to finish. The Red Shoes is a beautiful, poignant vista to revel in, with Powell and Pressburger paying devotion to art, beauty, love and loss. This is not just a film. It’s an experience.



RATING: A+