"Why do you dance?" ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) impassibly asks Vicki Page (Moira Shearer), another of these Covent Garden dreamers who can't fool him.
But Miss Vicky plays in another league, she marks a pause and retorts "why do you want to live?", the man who was so stingy in smiles lets one slip, he's obviously amused by that question, it's a rhetorical one but he answers nonetheless, that's how thrown off he is: "I don't know, but I must" That's her answer too.
And that simple exchange encapsulates what Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic masterpiece "The Red Shoes" is about: Passion.
The film is one of the greatest, if not the all-time best movie about ballet, it's all fitting that the title contains the word "shoes", but its soul rests in the word "red" word, red like the fire that ignites three people caught in an odd triangle of love and dedication to art. Some do arts for a living, some live for art, what when these two visions collide? What when there's a choice to make? But I'm being hasty here, let's get back to the genesis ... or how a simple screenplay meant to be a vehicle for a Hollywood star became another bull's-eye from the Archers!
The screenplay is actually both an original and an adapted one, like many self-referential show-within-show movies, it is based on a pre-existing work and make backstage realities and fictional shows converge toward the sameconclusion. One can make an easy comparison with Darren Arronofksy's "Black Swan" and Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" as the emotional skeleton. Working on an existing work is crucial because two original stories can strike as contrived coincidences while a work with an existence of its own allows a better suspension of disbelief.
And it's like Hans Christian Andersen's tale was begging for such a parallel story. The tale is about a woman who puts on some red shoes from a Demonic shoemaker and then can't stop dancing, what starts as an enchanting musical escapade with her boyfriend turns out into a nightmare, the girl dances until she wears nothing but rags and end up so exhausted she got her feet cut to stop the curse... the story is the perfect embodiment of the way passion can drive people to extremes... with a few Faustian undertones.
Powell and Pressburger made a lavish movie about people who are all deeply dedicated to their art and can't allow anything to interfere with it, it's just as if there was a sort of a pact with the devil in a movie that doesn't seem to have any villains. Lermontov is the closest to one but it's more a posture than a nature. Played with dignified severity by Walbrook, he's the kind of man who doesn't let any emotions interfere with work and his only outburst of genuine sympathy happen to be approvals of good work. And when he hires a young pianist as an assistant conductor, it's because he can recognize talent when he sees it.
Julian Craster (Marius Goring) doesn't have the flashiest role of the leading trio but his seemingly lack of physical appeal justifies that he would be the easiest to surrender to love while enhancing Lermontov's frustration that Vicki make a rival out of such a bland man. Lermontov' fortress of confidence is obviously shaken; he could have lost Vicki's heart for Art but not for Julian. We know from that point that tragedy is tiptoeing toward their people's lives. Lermontov himself was based on famous Ballet Russes founder who fired two dancers after they fell in love.
But as riveting as the story is, it doesn't tell one tenth about the film's greatness.
"The Red Shoes" is a dazzling looking film served with Technicolor magnificence, restored with the sheer passion of Martin Scorsese who holds it as one of his favorites, a movie where the hair of Moira Shearer can't inspire any better description than the one written in Powell's memoirs "an autumn bonfire", and where the score and the cinematography render all the grace and magic of the ballet and the tragedy of great art, summed up in that meaningful statement: "a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit."
While "Black Swan" was an introspection into the agony and spirit of a tormented soul with the same tragic perfection at the end, "Red Shoes" is a more extraverted hymn to the beauty of dance and the way the music can command the most graceful fantasies, and the film couldn't have conveyed that message had it not contaminated the crew, which means the director, art-designers, the camera operators, the writer and the choreographers.
"The Red Shoes" is renowned for a long ballet sequence when we can have a proper view on Moira Shearer's talent as a professional dancer. That Powell wanted a real dancer was the right approach, proving that he respected viewers, art and artists and that a debutante like Shearer or professional dancers such as Leonide Massine or Ludmilla Tchérina could be so natural is one of these miracles allowed by the Gods of the reel when you show them enough respect.
The dancers might have made a pact with the Devil, the Archers made one with Heaven. And as for the ballet in itself, it's a moment of pure heavenly magic that transcends the story and puts us viewers in Vicki's state of mind, it's a surreal combination of stage artifices and camera magic, an extraordinary symbiosis between reality and dreams. It's also a masterstroke of directing featuring many daring special effects we would be wowing over if we weren't so drawn by the music and the art-direction (two deserved Oscar wins for the film).
Truffaut demanded that a film expressed "either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema". That's exactly what "The Red Shoes" are about: joy and agony disguised as sheer virtuosity.
But Miss Vicky plays in another league, she marks a pause and retorts "why do you want to live?", the man who was so stingy in smiles lets one slip, he's obviously amused by that question, it's a rhetorical one but he answers nonetheless, that's how thrown off he is: "I don't know, but I must" That's her answer too.
And that simple exchange encapsulates what Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic masterpiece "The Red Shoes" is about: Passion.
The film is one of the greatest, if not the all-time best movie about ballet, it's all fitting that the title contains the word "shoes", but its soul rests in the word "red" word, red like the fire that ignites three people caught in an odd triangle of love and dedication to art. Some do arts for a living, some live for art, what when these two visions collide? What when there's a choice to make? But I'm being hasty here, let's get back to the genesis ... or how a simple screenplay meant to be a vehicle for a Hollywood star became another bull's-eye from the Archers!
The screenplay is actually both an original and an adapted one, like many self-referential show-within-show movies, it is based on a pre-existing work and make backstage realities and fictional shows converge toward the sameconclusion. One can make an easy comparison with Darren Arronofksy's "Black Swan" and Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" as the emotional skeleton. Working on an existing work is crucial because two original stories can strike as contrived coincidences while a work with an existence of its own allows a better suspension of disbelief.
And it's like Hans Christian Andersen's tale was begging for such a parallel story. The tale is about a woman who puts on some red shoes from a Demonic shoemaker and then can't stop dancing, what starts as an enchanting musical escapade with her boyfriend turns out into a nightmare, the girl dances until she wears nothing but rags and end up so exhausted she got her feet cut to stop the curse... the story is the perfect embodiment of the way passion can drive people to extremes... with a few Faustian undertones.
Powell and Pressburger made a lavish movie about people who are all deeply dedicated to their art and can't allow anything to interfere with it, it's just as if there was a sort of a pact with the devil in a movie that doesn't seem to have any villains. Lermontov is the closest to one but it's more a posture than a nature. Played with dignified severity by Walbrook, he's the kind of man who doesn't let any emotions interfere with work and his only outburst of genuine sympathy happen to be approvals of good work. And when he hires a young pianist as an assistant conductor, it's because he can recognize talent when he sees it.
Julian Craster (Marius Goring) doesn't have the flashiest role of the leading trio but his seemingly lack of physical appeal justifies that he would be the easiest to surrender to love while enhancing Lermontov's frustration that Vicki make a rival out of such a bland man. Lermontov' fortress of confidence is obviously shaken; he could have lost Vicki's heart for Art but not for Julian. We know from that point that tragedy is tiptoeing toward their people's lives. Lermontov himself was based on famous Ballet Russes founder who fired two dancers after they fell in love.
But as riveting as the story is, it doesn't tell one tenth about the film's greatness.
"The Red Shoes" is a dazzling looking film served with Technicolor magnificence, restored with the sheer passion of Martin Scorsese who holds it as one of his favorites, a movie where the hair of Moira Shearer can't inspire any better description than the one written in Powell's memoirs "an autumn bonfire", and where the score and the cinematography render all the grace and magic of the ballet and the tragedy of great art, summed up in that meaningful statement: "a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit."
While "Black Swan" was an introspection into the agony and spirit of a tormented soul with the same tragic perfection at the end, "Red Shoes" is a more extraverted hymn to the beauty of dance and the way the music can command the most graceful fantasies, and the film couldn't have conveyed that message had it not contaminated the crew, which means the director, art-designers, the camera operators, the writer and the choreographers.
"The Red Shoes" is renowned for a long ballet sequence when we can have a proper view on Moira Shearer's talent as a professional dancer. That Powell wanted a real dancer was the right approach, proving that he respected viewers, art and artists and that a debutante like Shearer or professional dancers such as Leonide Massine or Ludmilla Tchérina could be so natural is one of these miracles allowed by the Gods of the reel when you show them enough respect.
The dancers might have made a pact with the Devil, the Archers made one with Heaven. And as for the ballet in itself, it's a moment of pure heavenly magic that transcends the story and puts us viewers in Vicki's state of mind, it's a surreal combination of stage artifices and camera magic, an extraordinary symbiosis between reality and dreams. It's also a masterstroke of directing featuring many daring special effects we would be wowing over if we weren't so drawn by the music and the art-direction (two deserved Oscar wins for the film).
Truffaut demanded that a film expressed "either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema". That's exactly what "The Red Shoes" are about: joy and agony disguised as sheer virtuosity.