Ambition is roughly equal parts possessiveness and
obsession; it’s a desire that grows out of trying to grasp something just out
of reach. But it’s also formed out of a feeling that whatever we’re trying to
claim could end up as not ours, and no one, no matter how modest their
ambitions might be, wants that. The Red
Shoes is about ambitious individuals driven by their passions and their
aching aspirations towards greatness and memorialization. It’s a film about a
ballet company, and the compromises and questionable behavior taken in the name
of success and artistry. The film uses the Hans Christen Anderson fairy tale of
the same name, turned into a ballet performance, and utilizes it as mirror for
the story of the theater company. Anderson’s dark fable told the story of a
girl who bought a pair of red shoes and couldn’t stop dancing once she had put
them on. Like many fairy tales in their original forms, it ends rather dark,
with the girl dead. The upstart dancer Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) tells us that she values dancing above
life; she wishes to be a famous dancer above all else. The manager of the
company Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) takes a shine to her; he is unsettlingly possessive of her, for reasons
that are never entirely clear, possibly sexual or paternal. These feelings of
possession severely deepen when the dancer falls madly in love with the
company’s young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), who has written the score for The Red Shoes opera. Jack Cardiff's beautiful cinematography is saturated in bright colors. It envelops us,
particularly during the film’s dance sequence, featuring surreal, dream-like
imagery. The characters’ passions seem to seep out into reality, turning the
even more solidly built traditional storytelling aspects into something that feels
sinister. When the events of the play start displaying themselves in reality,
we can tell where it’s all heading, but it’s still shocking and electrifying.
Grade: A
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