The Red Shoes 1948

This is a film, mainly, about ballet. Yeah ballet, what of it ? Think I can't sit alone, with the curtains drawn, and watch a film about ballet ? Well I can. This is supposed to be a classic of British cinema, and, well, it's pretty good. It's basically about a bunch of people who are quite into ballet. They're making a dancing version of Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Red Shoes' in which a ballerina gets some magic shoes that help her dance. Unfortunately the shoes don't let her stop dancing, thus making friends/having a boyfriend pretty tricky. (Imagine having a girlfriend that wouldn't stop dancing, it would get old pretty quick.) Eventually the shoes dance her to death. Bummer. But as the film progresses we realize that star dancer Victoria Page's (Moria Shearer) life is coming to reflect that of the character she's playing. Its like a less creepy David Lynch film, all about obsession with art and the blurring of lines between reality and fiction and that sort of thing. The story is compelling but the real strength of the film comes from its visuals. Directors Powell and Pressburger draw from an impressive range of filming techniques, most powerfully exhibited in a hallucinatory dance sequence, which give the film a poetic subtlety. God I sound like a prick.


Jake Garriock