Movie Time: The Red Shoes

It's Movie Time!  

Today's movie was released on this date (September 6th) in the United Kingdom in 1948.

Considered perhaps the best film ever made by the British filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this is The Red Shoes.

Warning: this is one of those films where NOBODY in this DAMN MOVIE is HAPPY!! 

Who's who in The Red Shoes?

Victoria 'Vicky' Page, a young unknown dancer who is catapulted to fame as one of the greatest dancers in all of Europe.  Her passion is for the art of the dance but her heart yearns for love.  And she finds it with....

Julian Craster, a young composer who struggles to make a name for himself.  His music is his passion but he also wishes to know love.  He falls in love with Vicky much to the consternation of....

Boris Lermontov, the imprisario of the Ballet Lermontov, the leading ballet reportory company in Europe. He has taken both Vicky and Julian under his wing as part of his company and he demands complete fealty to their art and their craft and maybe not so much with the love stuff, you know?

NOBODY in this DAMN MOVIE is HAPPY!! (Not even the young couple in love!) 

Lermontov has especially high hopes for Vicky as he makes her the star of a ballet written specifically for her, The Ballet of the Red Shoes.

The centerpiece of the film The Red Shoes is an extended dance sequence from The Ballet of the Red Shoes. It's surrealistic scene inspired by German expressionism or perhaps cocaine was involved somehow, maybe? Imagine one of those Gene Kelly climatic dance scenes but cranked up to be even weirder.  

The Ballet of the Red Shoes is a resounding success. Lermontov revitalises the company's repertoire with Vicky in the lead roles while Julian is tasked to compose new scores. Lermontov  is enamored with Vicky which expresses itself in his ceaseless push for her to acheive perfection in constant rehearsals and a grueling performance schedule. 

Also the red shoes may be... cursed? Haunted? Something is weird about the red shoes. 

NOBODY in this DAMN MOVIE is HAPPY!! 

It's Lermontov's way to keep Vicky close and under his control and away from Julian.   

Which doesn't work as Vicky and Julian continue their affair.

So Lermontov fires Julian. 

And defying Lermontov's influence on her life and career, Vicky quits the company to follow Julian back to London. The tow marry while Julian goes to work composing an opera.

After some time, Lermontov comes calling and convinces Vicky to "put on the red shoes again," to dance her famous role once more. On the verge of his new opera's debut, Julian urges Vicky to reconsider returning to Lermontov.

Torn between her love for Julian and her need to dance, Vicky eventually chooses the latter.  

On the night of Vicky's return to the stage, Julian leaves the theater to go to the railway station to return home.

NOBODY in this DAMN MOVIE is HAPPY!! 

Lermontov escorts Vicky to the stage wearing the red shoes and, seemingly under their influence, Vikcy turns and runs from the theater towards thge railway station. 

Vicky leaps from a balcony and falls in front of an oncoming train which kills her and....

What the fuck?!?! REALLY?!?!

Was the fall an accident? Or suicide? Or even murder committed by the cursed red shoes?

Where the hell did this movie go?

The Ballet of the Red Shoes goes on with a spotlight on the empty space where Vicky would have been. 

Meanwhile, as Vicky lies dying on a stretcher (wait, being hit by a TRAIN did not kill her right away?) she asks Julian to remove the red shoes, just as the ballet ends.

Well, that was just weird.

The Red Shoes was released to considerable critical acclaim, receiving a total of five Academy Award nominations, including a win for Best Original Score and Best Art Direction. 

Some dance critics were less favorably inclined towards the film,claiming The Ballet of the Red Shoes was depicted in an  inrealistic fantastical  way.       

The Red Shoes was voted the ninth greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute in 1999. 

In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics for Time Out magazine ranked The Red Shoes the fifth best British film ever.

I had heard about The Red Shoes for years and was intrigued to experience it myself.  It is a powerful albeit strange movie and objectively, I can see why it has earned it's reputation as a great film.

But... and I cannot stress this enough:

NOBODY in this DAMN MOVIE is HAPPY!!