#44: The Red Shoes
Hi babes,
Well well well. Funny to see you here!
I took a bit of a ~*~break~*~ but I’m back! I’m here! It’s gonna be okay.
I also wanted to share two things. Skip if you don’t care about me:
1.) Last year during the pandemic, I completed the first draft of an essay collection in Chloe Caldwell’s Essay Generator class offered through Catapult. At the end of the class, Catapult published excerpts from our collections, along with a beautiful essay on witnessing by Chloe. My essay, called “First 9/11,” is about tween desire and tragedy. You can check it out here and read Chloe’s essay and my brilliant classmates’ excerpts here.
2.) Catapult also recently launched an audio showcase from our class, which includes a short excerpt from us and a brief intro about our collections from Chloe. It’s like a little podcast and it’s really well done! You can listen here. My reading is first, but please hang on the line to hear the gorgeous work from my loves Caroline, Courtney, Allyson, Elizabeth, and Elle.
#44: The Red Shoes
Director: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Country: United Kingdom
Year: 1948
Runtime: 133 minutes
Language: English
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: suicide, verbal abuse
The opening of this movie worried me because there were horns. I said to Josh, “Oh no, this is giving me…”
And he accurately responded, “Henry V vibes…?”
YES. YES IT IS. (Don’t worry, it was a fleeting moment. It’s nothing like it.)
A group of students is attending a ballet performance because their music professor, Palmer (Austin Trevor), is premiering his new score. Very quickly, one of the students, Julian (Marius Goring), recognizes the composition as his own. Whoops!
During the performance, a fancy lady sends Palmer a note inviting him and his friend, the ballet company’s impresario, Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) to attend a party at her house that night. So, I 1000% didn’t know that an impresario was an actual job title. Did you? I thought it was like a casanova or something. But, no! It’s basically like a producer. Which is to say, Lermontov is intense and has a lot of power. The fancy lady, Lady Neston (Irene Browne) is there with her niece, Vicky (Moira Shearer), who is wearing a literal crown (like the queen of hearts), and this is my plea to bring back crowns in formal settings.
Also, the ballet looks….bad? It’s very sloppy?
Julian, the guy whose teacher ripped off his score, leaves the performance early because he’s so bummed.
After the ballet, Palmer and Lermontov go to Lady Neston’s party. Apparently the rich niece, Vicky, is also an aspiring ballet dancer! Well what are the odds. Lermontov declines Lady Neston’s invitation to watch Vicky dance in the middle of the party because ballet is his “religion” and it wouldn't be appropriate.
At the bar, not knowing who he’s talking to, he tells Vicky he’s been gratefully spared the horror of the dance.
He puts his foot in his mouth, but saves it by asking her, “Why do you want to dance?” She asks, “Why do you want to live?” Which we have to start saying to people more often.
Charmed, he invites her to attend a company rehearsal the next day.
The next day, Julian shows up at Lermontov’s house demanding to get a letter back that he wrote him about how he’s the real composer of that ballet piece; I’m not sure why, though. Lermontov instead asks him to play him something original on the piano (why are pianos everywhere fancy??). Lermontov is dressed in a dress and what looks to be Timbalands. After hearing him play, he hires Julian as an orchestra coach/assistant to the company’s conductor and tells him he should be flattered that he was stolen from which is kind of true but also not the point?
Julian arrives on his first day and the ballet is chaos. Everyone is so bitchy (especially teacher Ljubov [Léonide Massine]) and their Russian accents are terrible. Vicky also arrives and is bitched at, but is able to attend a warm-up.
Julian is also able to help the orchestra practice “Heart of Fire,” the piece he wrote and Palmer stole.
Vicky is approved to dance in one of the company’s matinee performances of Swan Lake.
Lermonov realizes her talent and invites her to Paris. Fun fact: the actress who plays Vicky was an IRL Scottish ballet dancer and she is very good!
The ballet goes to Paris, where they will be putting on a new ballet called The Ballet of the Red Shoes. Julian writes the music for it, naturally.
It was at this point that I wondered what the stakes of this movie were. Nothing was really happening. And then Lermonov tells Julian the plot of the ballet. . .
It’s based on a story by Hans Chrisitan Anderson. A girl vows to dance in a pair of red ballet shoes. By the end of the night, she wants to go home because she’s tired. But the shoes are not; they want to dance forever. They take her out in the street, in the forest, etc., even as time goes on. And in the end. . . exhausted by all the dancing. . .she dies. OH OKAY so this lady might get twirled to death by some evil shoesssss!! I was, in a word, in. I did not know this story would break my heart :/
After the lead ballerina, Irina (Ludmilla Tchérina), gets *gasp* MARRIED, she is fired from the company.
Lermontov invites Vicky to his house and she is dressed like a cake topper, again, with that crown! Everyone is dressed very casually and she covers well by saying, “I was just going out when I got your message.” Lermontov invites her to be the new lead while telling her his colleagues don’t believe in her talent which is like okaaaayyyyyy? But also, guh fuh huh!
That night, Julian and Vicky flirt on a balcony and end it with a handshake. HOT.
Rehearsals begin and it looks like my personal hell.
So much yelling, mostly men at Vicky because she can’t get the hang of the music, and at one point Lermonov doesn’t even let her drink a glass of water! Lermontov’s solution for Vicky’s struggle is for Julian to play her the music live at all of her meals.
Julian and Vicky fight at the next rehearsal because she thinks the music is too fast and he thinks she’s incompetent. But right before opening night, Julian stops by her dressing room to wish her good luck and tell her to dance at whatever tempo she likes; he’ll follow along. Love is in. the. AIR.
The next 15 minutes is an absolutely STUNNING ballet sequence. You can watch it here, and I recommend you do!:
It isn’t all happening for real at the ballet because there are costume changes and visual effects that obviously aren’t possible in a live stage performance, which is fun.
The play ends with Vicky’s character dancing into her own funeral, exhausted and dressed in a filthy dress. She asks her lover to remove the red shoes. When he does, she dies. The ballet is a huge success.
Lermontov tells Vicky, basically, you’re the new star of this company. You will have all the lead roles and we will travel the world.
Later, Lermontov hears that Julian and Vicky are dating and in love. And boy are they. . .they’re canoodling in a carriage where the driver (which Josh called the “coachmeister”) has fallen asleep so they’re just being walked along the Mediterranean by a horse while Julian says very nice things to her. I DID tear up. Anyway, Lermontov is super unhappy to hear this news. In a later performance of Swan Lake, he notices Vicky smile at Julian. After the performance, he confronts Julian about their relationship. Lermontov tells him Vicky will never be a great dancer if she’s distracted by love and by the way, Julian, your new music sucks. Julian says ballet is “a second rate form of expression” and Lermontov promptly fires him.
And guess who’s gonna lose out the hardest here.
Vicky decides to go with Julian and when she tells Lermontov, he refuses to shake her hand goodbye because he’s a salty baby. He re-hires Irina, whom he previously fired for getting married. Julian and Vicky move to London where Julian writes operas.
They lived happily ever after.
LOL JK
Lermontov finds out where Vicky and Julian are on vacation, gets on her train, and asks her to come back to the company. “Put on the red shoes, Vicky, and dance for us again,” he pleads. GF hasn’t danced in a WHILE. She agrees.
On opening night, Julian shows up (because apparently she didn’t tell him where she went) and begs her to leave with him on the next train; she tells him she has to dance. Lermonov shows up, too, and they both berate her with her two options: love or dancing. She just weeps and it’s SO awful. Julian leaves.
Vicky puts on the red shoes and, as she approaches the stage, turns around, runs out of the theater, and jumps off a balcony into the path of a moving train.
Lermonov takes the stage to YELL at the audience that Vicky will not be able to dance tonight or any other night. In her honor, they perform the ballet with just an empty spotlight in her place. Vicky lays bleeding on a stretcher and asks Julian to remove the red shoes. When he does, the ballet ends.
The End.
This movie fucked me up for daaayyysss. I was surprised by this because at the time, I wasn’t particularly blown away by the acting or the writing and I don’t have a strong feeling about ballet or impresarios. But the last 20 minutes were gut-wrenching as you see how awful it is when a person is stripped of their agency. Two men with lots of power—one held love over her head, the other, her career, but really, her life (remember when she equated dancing with living?)—had essentially total control over her. I don’t know if the red shoes were possessed or if she died by suicide, but either way, she felt her life was at a dead end. She either chose to end it because she couldn’t see a life without Julian (who didn’t respect her need to dance) or ballet (her only two options), under the thumb of a man who didn’t respect her choice in partner, or the shoes themselves murdered her. Either way, she was screwed.
Ultimately, it reminded me of one of the saddest parts in Mad Men, when Megan Draper’s mother tells her, “Not every little girl gets to do what they want. The world cannot support that many ballerinas.”
I wish I could say we were moving into some more uplifting territory, but this is the Criterion Collection after all. Next up is Taste of Cherry, a 1997 Iranian film (a first in the collection!) that I have seen before and found to be both beautiful and depressing. It is also, notably, one of Roger Ebert’s “most hated films of all time.” See you there!
XOXO,
Steph