The Red Shoes
Released in 1948, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
The Red Shoes opens with something so completely of film, so tricky and so avant of prior mediums, that it puts the rest of the movie somewhat in its shadow. We are at the ballet long before showtime, a crowd of young people are bursting to get in, the doors finally open, they rush to grab seats – then they wait. We need the wait – we need to get this sense of energy, that dance and music are alive and vital in the culture; we need to see the kids restless, squabbling over points of art. We need the wait, but we also want the show; a cut gets us the show but not the wait, while no cut gets us the wait and, the patience of an audience being what it is, no show. Powell and Pressburger square this circle with the simplest device: a bit of text scrolling across the screen – the screen still live, still showing the impatient youth – that reads 45 MINUTES LATER. No cut! No delay! Just objective time yielding to the subjective needs of entertainment, all done with a punch and ease no other medium but film could offer – a little shrug to say ah let’s get to the good part, but the shrug is better than the good part.
Attending the ballet is Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a young composer. He’s here to support his mentor, plummy Professor Palmer, who has done the score; but as the show proceeds his emotions darken and turn sour and complex – Palmer has lifted from music shared with him by Craster. Craster ends by storming out. Thus in The Red Shoes we are uneasy from the start; the arts are presented as corrupt and corrupting. Secure in his gilded box Palmer extends an invitation to the ballet’s producer Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) – come attend an after-party put on by Lady Neston (Irene Browne). Lermontov, concealed for the moment behind a curtain, demurs. Palmer gives him a knowing half-smile: “She’s a great patron of the arts”. Message received; Lermontov accepts.
The party it turns is also meant to be an audition, for Lady Neston’s niece, Vicky Page (Moira Shearer). The idea is Boris attends, she dances, he takes her up; but when he learns of the plan he demurs – his philosophy, and also even he might admit his schtick, is that dance is his religion; he will not sully it with such maneuverings. “Attractive brute,” comments Lady Neston, face full to frame, staring out at us.
Despite this refusal, Vicky and Boris meet cute a bit later on at the same party; in this context, feeling more in control, Boris is open to her possibilities. He must have control. In a sense The Red Shoes is primarily an unveiling of how deep this need goes, how rooted it is in fear and anger, how dangerous it is when challenged. Complaisant now Boris invites Vicky to audition for his troupe. Caster also quickly enters his orbit; the next morning he comes to Boris’s office, seeking to retrieve a letter he had written outing Palmer’s plagiarism. Boris has read the letter, dominates the situation, and Caster leaves with the matter of plagiarism dropped and a job training up the troupe’s orchestra.
From here we are in for a long smooth ascent, a ride up the escalator. Obviously Vicky and Caster must rise – first they will earn a little bit of success, and then a lot. Eventually, because this is too well-crafted a film – well-crafted within its context – to forego standard plotting, we know that they will face an obstacle. The tension comes in anticipating when this obstacle will appear and what form it will take; but for the longest time there is nothing. Or rather the setbacks suffered by both are more for texturing than for dramatic effect – Craster for example is reprimanded for over-rehearsing the orchestra; and the pleasures of this section are backstage pleasures, the vicarious satisfaction of seeing Vicky win the respect of her fellow dancers, the chunky aesthetics of scenery put up and scenery torn down. Yet beneath these pleasures there is still that shifting, restless sense of unease, activated in the film’s first scene and never quite calmed – almost a sense of rot.
It is easy to point to Boris as the problem – even if for now he is supportive of Vicky and Craster, we see his need for control and his anger, we see the want of an obstacle, we put two and two together, we brace for a crack-up (and we are right). But Boris is in fact largely symptomatic, a manifestation of the larger pressures of art, or at least a certain of view of art, of Art. Art’s credo is that aesthetic achievement is real, measurable, rankable, and vitally important; that value declines exponentially as it recedes from Art’s pinnacle; and that achievement can only come from a relentless, monastic dedication. To have been singled out by a priest of Art – by Boris – is to have an immense burden placed on you, a burden that is mirrored, in the case of both Vicky and Craster, by internal ambition. Thus even as both characters succeed, they become increasingly embedded within a philosophy that stipulates that they are not doing enough, that they can never do enough, that they should be in a state of constant panic over dropped minutes, momentary lapses. A step off the high road is a plunge. In brackish contrast to these ideals, a counterpoint that heightens rather than relieving their stresses, is art’s fallen nature; that art is a social practice, vulnerable to all of the usual abuses of power, all the petty materials failures. The low, terrestrial road is just as dangerous as the high.
For walking we have the red shoes. The story, taken from Hans Christian Andersen: a young woman is given a pair of enchanted red shoes, she puts them on, she starts to dance, she dances beautifully, she can’t stop dancing, she dies. Boris selects the tale for development into a ballet, Craster for the music, and Vicky for the central role. The ballet itself we get in full, all twenty minutes of it, an enlarged and to my mind less elegant expression of the freedom shown by that previous brief squib of text announcing the passage of forty-five minutes. The scene begins within the prevailing mood of realism – we are in a theatre, Vicky and her cast mates are performing. Then the red shoes are presented to her, and she simply jumps right into them – they are placed on her feet via a jump cut. From this moment on the dance appears to us from an unstable point of view; sometimes we are in Vicky’s head, watching as an image of Boris looms up oppressively from the stage, other times we feel as if we are seeing what the theatre audience might see, and still other times we are in a dreamworld of rubbery physics and shadowy iconography.
With this triumphant premier Vicky and Caster have arrived; and soon we learn that they’ve fallen in love (the film, appropriately has time for a twenty minute ballet but none for their courtship). Boris, hearing the news, reacts with the word “charming,” inserting a glottal fricative between the affricate and the vowel, which is not a pronunciation ever used by anyone who is truly charmed. Indeed he is not. The awaited obstacle has arrived; having placed a god (Eros) before Art, Vicky and Caster are exiled from the troupe. This could be a chance for Boris to become a monster, but the film is careful to keep him restrained, and it is this restraint that really saves the somewhat awkward denouement. By keeping our sympathies in play between Vicky, Caster, and Boris we are saved from too pat a moral stance: of course Vicky must follow her heart, love above all, etc. Boris might be too slavish a devotee to his aesthetic, he might be blinkered in how to achieve it, but he is not wantonly cruel; he has his values just as Vicky and Craster have theirs, different values but not barbaric values. Dance being his religion, not music, it is Vicky whom he tries to pry away and reconcile with. She is willing to at least attempt a bridge between her art and personal life – in the end actually it is Craster who objects, and it is this odd and hasty slotting of Craster into a villain’s role that makes the last few minutes of The Red Shoes creak and grown a bit; the coming tragedy does not result smoothly from the following of an established line, but requires a sudden jerk of the narrative apparatus.
The film is a touchstone for its style, with the gouache tonality of its Technicolor, its long busy shots full of comings and goings, the way its camera swoops and glides but then will suddenly batten onto a display strong emotion, pushing forward right up into the faces of its characters – an aggressive interest, an invasive interest. It is not a hysterical film, for the most part. It is urbane and often cool. There is only a high thrum of hysteria here and there, and only a few brief shrieks of it. But like a well-dressed, clean-scrubbed man with only a slim crescent of dried blood beneath one pinky nail, the overall effect is ominous enough.
