The Red Shoes Review
dir by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Archers)
The Red Shoes film, released in 1948, is an adaptation of the eponymous fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen that explores the heartrending tension of being torn between romantic love and love for one’s art, in this case ballet. The film is a loose adaptation of the fairytale, as the female protagonist in Andersen’s story is torn between divine love and love for the material world, in her case, a pair of extraordinary red shoes. The compelling aspect of the fairytale that the filmmaking partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger seize is how this pair of mystical red shoes can be imbued with new meaning by any artist working with the story. In their film, Powell and Pressburger take the magical quality inherent in the red shoes and recontextualize it, all while keeping with the overarching structure of the original fairytale. The magic force of the red shoes remains a mystery in the film, but their appeal to the protagonist is indicative of differing variants of desire: love for the material world versus love for dance (art).
Both the fairytale and the film appeal to the dark chaos that fills out the emotional landscape of desire in any of its forms. They each incite the reader and viewer to turn deeply inward, especially if one is seriously trying to uncover the source of their desire. The fairytale and the film adaptation are very different because while the fairytale is a comedy – Karen, the girl, suffers for her sin, and is redeemed through the Lord’s mercy – the film is a tragedy: Victoria Page, the main dancer, becomes lost in the inner emotional landscape of being torn between her desires, and either commits suicide or is murdered by the red ballet shoes, neither cause is clear and the ending is left ambiguous.
The influence of German Expressionism is strongly pronounced in the film, most notably in its application to the film’s famed centerpiece ballet sequence that was designed by German art director Hein Heckroth. (A paradigm of German Expressionism as it applies to film is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). Heckroth painted over 600 scenes for both costume and set design, some of them unrealized, to prepare for the film and that guided his artistic process on set. Speaking on the decision to designate Heckroth as the production designer, Michael Powell said, “It was, I think the first time that a painter had been given the chance to design a film, including the titles, and it was a triumph of work and organisation.”[1] This was a huge feat and the painterly quality specifically of the 18-minute ballet sequence is noteworthy. Catherine Suroweic, in her book on European art directors wrote:
"For their new film [The Red Shoes], Powell and Pressburger were keen to devise a new type of film decor, one less heavy and restricted, and [one that] allowed Heckroth's imagination free reign to create a world beyond the limitations of the stage. This man of the theatre was the ideal designer for them, a surrealist romantic who was not afraid to experiment, and knew how to suggest an atmosphere with economy and an expressionist use of colour. His abstract, painted sketches were full of mood, movement and theatrical flair. For the famous ballet he designed impressionistic sets, using materials such as chiffon, gauze, paper mache and cellophane."[2]
The film received five Academy Award nominations. It won Best Art Direction and Best Original Score.
Heckroth’s scenic paintings and set design are evocative of work by expressionist painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. I was particularly impressed by the way in which Heckroth’s sketches capture movement.
I watched the centerpiece ballet sequence many times over, both for its visual pleasure and in an effort to interpret its unique adaptation of the original Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. The middle of the ballet sequence, which replicates onstage the part of the fairytale when Karen first puts on the red shoes and goes to the grand ball, was staged with a carnivalesque-like theme; the village atmosphere Vicky dances through resembles a circus parade. It reminded me of the carnivalesque mode invented by the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin – a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos – and in the ballet embodies Vicky’s attempts to be freed from the mysterious sovereignty of the red shoes. The Surrealist elements in the sequence are just as prominent as the Expressionist ones and these are highly experimental, especially for the period in which the film was shot. At one point, Vicky is literally dancing through a painting and there is an unusual but captivating part of the sequence filmed in slow motion wherein she is doing pirouettes through a room full of sheets of painted cellophane that are engulfing her, chaotically spinning and falling around her. There is even a point towards the end of the sequence during which the opera house audience becomes an ocean, a choice that is of course rich with metaphor. I became especially interested as I was rewatching the sequence in how the original fairytale and its cinematic representation in the centerpiece ballet sequence compare.
In the original fairytale, Karen, the little girl, commits the sin of placing her reverence for a pair of red shoes above her reverence for God. She wears these shoes to a mass, which distracts the congregation with their unique and outstanding beauty, and at the mass when Karen kneels before the altar and puts the golden goblet to her mouth, she thinks only of the red shoes. It seems to her as though the shoes were swimming about in the goblet, and she forgets to sing the psalm, and also, she forgets to say the “Lord’s Prayer.”
In “The Ballet of the Red Shoes,” the ballerina is not torn between divine love and love for the red shoes, but rather romantic love and love for dance. This is the dilemma that the female protagonist of the film is also trapped in as she falls in love with and marries the conductor of the Ballet Lermontov. The drama of the film reflects the drama of the ballet within it. In the fairytale, the maker of the red shoes is a rich shoemaker. In the ballet in the film, the maker, and the first person we see on stage during the ballet, is a jester. This choice embodies the carnivalesque mode I mentioned above and uses carnival as a means of breaking down barriers and of overcoming power inequalities and hierarchies. The life of the festival, which is the shape the grand ball from Andersen’s fairytale takes in the ballet sequence in the film, becomes a playful mockery of the ballerina’s oppression by her conflicting desires of romantic love and love for dance.
In both the fairytale and the film’s famous centerpiece ballet sequence, the red shoes initially carry the ballerina to a public space to dance. In the fairytale, it’s a grand ball, and in the film, it’s a public event in a carnivalesque-like village arena. But then, also in both pieces, the shoes, which take over the autonomy of her body, lead the ballerina astray: in the fairytale they lead her into a dark forest and in the film’s ballet the ballerina is led to a dark, abandoned city square. But then in the film something very interesting happens: the ballerina breaks through the building into some kind of imaginary, surrealist dreamscape. There is literal imagery of a wall of an opera house cracking open with the ballerina peering out into the vista beyond.
In the fairytale, Karen meets with an executioner. She pleads with the executioner to cut off her feet with the shoes, rather than her head, as the means to atone for her sin. However, in the film’s ballet sequence, Vicky tries to cut off the shoes with a knife that magically turns into a green branch full of roses, thus she cannot remove the shoes, and the shoes dance her to her death and her inner conflict is not resolved. This is what happens in the film’s plot as well: there is some sort of death drive inherent in the shoes that either murders Vicky or leads her to suicide.
In the fairytale, the ballerina asks the Lord to save her, and she is redeemed through his mercy. “The Red Shoes” fairytale is a comedy and the film, and its internal ballet, are tragedies. In the film, Vicky is oppressed by her devotion to the world of ballet and cannot overcome it. Essentially, in the fairytale, Karen repents and places her love for the Lord above her love for the red shoes. In the film, the ballerina cannot decide between the two kinds of love that are tearing her apart, romantic or her love for dance, and ultimately this leads to her death by suicide. The ambiguity inherent in the film is that it is not clear whether Vicky jumps off the balcony or the power of the shoes thrusts her off it.
The costuming of the film is phenomenal, this includes the dancer’s makeup, and provides strong inspiration for makeup artists. The dialogue delivered by Boris Lermontov, the owner and operator of the Ballet Lermontov, is particularly punchy and poignant, with respect to that of the other main characters. Boris is played by Anton Walbrook, a very attractive actor in an unusual way. In this film he wears a thick, trapezoidal-shaped mustache. He also has noteworthy starry blue eyes that glisten magically when they catch the light on set in a certain way. While Victoria Page is undeniably stunning, I would argue that his performance is the most entertaining of the cast.
One aspect that the film explores but never quite deliberately establishes is a budding romance between Victoria Page, the principal dancer of The Red Shoes ballet, and Boris. However, Boris’s infatuation with Victoria appears to have more to do with her talent than her personhood. In other words, his desire for her resembles an envy for her artistic talent in such a way that is at a remove from any sort of erotic desire. This indistinct quality of the relationship between the pair is a study of the kind of work the film most effectively handles, which is exploring the range of kinds of desire that exist between two people as well as conflicting desires that exist between an individual and the world they inhabit.
Star Rating: 4 out of 5
Links to Explore:
1. The 1845 eponymous fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen
http://hca.gilead.org.il/red_shoe.html
2. Hein Heckroth, art director
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hein_Heckroth
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exemplar of German Expressionism in cinema
4. “The Red Shoes: behind the scenes of the classic Powell and Pressburger film”
5. “The Red Shoes” Sketches (1948)
[1] The Guardian. "The Red Shoes: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Powell and Pressburger Film." November 13, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/film/gallery/2023/nov/13/the-red-shoes-concept-designs-of-the-classic-film-in-pictures.
[2] The Guardian, "The Red Shoes: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Powell and Pressburger Film," November 13, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/film/gallery/2023/nov/13/the-red-shoes-concept-designs-of-the-classic-film-in-pictures.
I appreciate your review. However, it's a fundamental facet of modern decorum to preface any review with a warning regarding "spoilers." The Red Shoes is on my watch list and you've spoiled the ending for me.