New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

The central, titular ballet, which manages to be about Vicky’s struggles between art and love, and also be an accurate adaptation of the Andersen story, works so well because it starts on a stage and then Powell and Pressburger blend the reality of the story with the theatricality in one fell swoop. The stage disappears, the sets become real, and the red shoes - which, in the story’s plot, force the main character to dance literally until she dies - become more than a prop. Once the actual ballet is over, the story continues, and Vicky ends up living the story of the shoes; it’s a major flight into tragic fancy for the filmmakers, but as vital today as they believed it was during the film’s making. Just as the set piece blends the reality of the story with the music, so does the ending make us question how much of what we saw was meant to feel real.

The film is rightly praised for its sparkling use of Technicolor, thanks to famed Archers cinematographer Jack Cardiff. The Blu-ray release (which I’ve not seen, unfortunately, but will vouch for anyway - it’s from Criterion, so it’s hard to imagine they’d screw things up) should likely make the already-bright colors pop out of the screen, blinding you with their dazzling power. The reds are redder, greens greener, and so forth. Such love and care is put into the technical aspects of the film that you’d almost wonder how the actors and script play. As Vicky, Moira Shearer is a dream and revelation, the dancer whose acting skills are the opposite of flat; Shearer is charming, prickly, and as driven a performer as you’ve seen. There’s no doubt she’s bringing her life to the character, but that’s the best kind of informed performing.

She’s matched by two dynamic, different actors: Anton Walbrook (from the great Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and La Ronde) as Lermontov, and Marius Goring as Julian Craster. Walbrook is charming, charismatic, and icy in the same breath, always luring the audience in and simultaneously making them back off just a bit. There’s no doubt to why everyone is so drawn to Lermontov; who wouldn’t be? Goring is less assertive, but so is Craster. Craster is a gifted conductor, but he’s also able to distance himself from the art of ballet, enough to desire a life to live outside the theatre. Goring is, in some ways, an audience surrogate in the beginning, as we watch him breathlessly take to the theatre to watch a new ballet, but in a realistic enough way for those audience members not enamored with the art to be sucked in.

What The Archers excelled at is creating worlds that are believable and livable, and worlds we don’t want to leave. When Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger present us with a creative community of dancers, choreographers, conductors, producers, and so forth, it may not be as sumptuous as James Cameron’s Pandora, but what they lacked for in budgets, the Archers made up for in desirability. I want to dine with these people in their twilit restaurants. I want to watch them create works of beauty. I want to go to their parties, meet their friends, and learn about them. The Red Shoes belongs to that rare class of films, where the movie works on so many levels, whether analyzing the academic nature of the story or basking in the glow of the colors jumping out at you, that you are thrilled at what magic can be created on strips of film.

Continued:       1       2       3