The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes is a fascinating movie. It is beautiful. It is tragic. It is dream-like and surreal. It is both about, and an adaptation of, Hans Christian Anderson’s tale by the same name, at the same time. Many people consider it one of the finest films ever made and I think they might be right.

At its core, The Red Shoes is about a girl who is torn between two worlds: one of an all consuming passion not just for dance, but dance at the highest level for the finest company, and one where she is able to have a more ordinary life. Each side of this divide is represented by a different man in her life: one who can make her the star ballerina for one of the most renowned dance companies in all of Europe and beyond, and one who offers comfort, affection, and a kind of rebellious freedom. This sets up what could have been a completely conventional story where the overbearing mentor and the nurturing outsider act as foils, rivals, and/or symbols for two different paths. However, The Red Shoes does something much cleverer.

This isn’t a story of the goodhearted boyfriend and the evil, controlling mentor. Instead, both men are deeply flawed, as people and in their relationships with her. They both, each in their own way, love her but don’t care about her. The head of the dance company loves her talent and her potential, but his own obsessive notion that one must forgo outside attachments makes her miserable and undermines her passion for the art. He doesn’t value her as a person. The suitor, however, loves her romantically but wants to put her in a traditional feminine box (circa 1948), denying her raison d’etre: to dance at the highest levels. He doesn’t value her as an artist.

This central tension is really what makes the movie so emotionally effective. We want to see Vicky succeed as a dancer and, on some level, we don’t necessarily believe she can’t have it all. However, as her mentor grows jealous of the boyfriend for monopolizing her time, and the boyfriend increasingly can’t understand why she won’t put his burgeoning career as a composer and conductor ahead of hers as a dancer, we see how her choices in life, perhaps driven by the very passions that define her, have put her in this situation to be let down again and again. When everything crescendos into its final act, starting just after the film’s mindblowingly sublime dream ballet and ending in Vicky’s ultimate surrender, those emotional beats are earned and our hearts break with the characters.

Speaking of the dream ballet, what an amazing piece of art. What a perfect marriage of dance as an artistic form and film as a unique medium within which it can be experienced. It begins with Anderson’s tale, as Vicky would have performed it for a theatrical audience, but as the subtext of the tale and the text of the movie overlap and intersect, the reality of the dance blurs, the figures from both stories become muddied, theatrical tricks are replaced with camera ones, and the thespian stage melts into a soundstage of pure cinematic construction. The dancing is beautiful. The design is perfect: bold at times and muted in others, but in both cases always exactly what the moment needs. The choice to place a 15 minute uninterrupted dance sequence right smack dab in the middle of the film is a bold one, even for a movie about ballet, but it just works. As a supreme hater of the dream ballet in an American in Paris, which I have always felt simply recaps the story we were literally just watching, this transcends that not just with its artistry but how it frames and utilizes the sequence within the larger story.

The dance sequence may be the most famous example, but the visuals throughout are staggeringly good. Though I have yet to watch much of their canon, Powell and Pressburger’s films have a reputation for their striking visual style and The Red Shoes certainly doesn’t disappoint. There is a richness to its colors and its environments, with a painterly quality to its compositions, lighting choices, and settings. You can almost feel the warm night air of the Mediterranean as characters walk along the waterfront in Monaco. There is also great use of color theory and “color as theme” here, in a way that reminded me of Vertigo. Red as the color of passion, emotion, and obsession is an obvious choice, the titular shoes of both the ballet and the movie being red after all, but the subtle use of red lights, red furniture, red accents on costumes, and so on consistently marks obsessive people and passionate moments in fun, subconscious ways. The movie also does a ton with yellows, especially in the beginning, and blues, as the film progresses, perhaps signifying aspirations and hard work in the former and opportunity and change in the latter. After all, it is in a yellow, candlelit room that Vicky tells her future mentor that dancing is like breathing to her, it is in a blue cloak that Vicky is told she has been selected as the next prima ballerina for the company, and it is on a grey terrace bathed in blue lights that Julian and Vicky first begin to fall in love.

Rather than continue to wax poetic about the storytelling, the performances, the exceptional cinematography, or even the clever thematic use of color, let me just say this movie is well worth your time. Sure, there are types of people who won’t like this. The way it plays loosely with a kind of fairy tale reality may rub the most ardent cinema realists the wrong way. The dramatic ending might feel like melodrama to those who love to critique anything narratively weightier than a helicopter being blown up. People who hate ballet might enjoy the human drama but not be able to hack the abundance of arabesques and pliés. But they are just wrong. This movie is such a complete and enthralling work of art with so much to offer in its heightened representation of obsession, drive, betrayal, and human tragedy, with so much to offer such a broad variety of viewers, that it feels wrong to do anything other than call it what it is: a masterpiece.

Would Recommend: If you are a connoisseur of great movies.

Would Not Recommend: If you can’t stand ballet.