The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

REVIEW: The Red Shoes

For those of you who haven’t heard of The Red Shoes, it is a film released in 1948 that is quoted by legendary directors such as Brian DePalma (Scarface) and Martin Scorcese (Taxi Driver) as being among their favourite films of all time. It is funding provided by Martin Scorcese that allows us to see this influential classic of British cinema digitally remastered and restored. It is a film not only acclaimed for its dramatic elements and its script, but also widely praised for its cinematography and musical score. Not to be missed.

BY JOHN McLEAN

The Red Shoes was originally a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Anderson about a girl who purchases a pair of bewitched shoes which force her to dance until she dies of exhaustion. In the film ‘The Red Shoes’ refers to a ballet that the bulk of the plot winds around. The directors, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, chose to use dancers that could act rather than actors that could dance with the result being a strong sense of the story being set against the ballet world and it allowed the inclusion of a 15 minute ballet recital as the crux of the film. Some viewers may be put off by the ballet element but apart from a few scenes (which are key to the plot) it could be set in any entertainment industry of the 1940s.

The story centres around the relationships between two young prodigies, ballet dancer Victoria “Vicky” Page (Moira Shearer) and composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and the cold, calculated but brilliant Boris Lermantov (Anton Walbrook), master of the Ballet Lermantov. The parallels between the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale and the film as a whole begin to reveal themselves when the choice has to be made by Vicky between her love for Julian or her need to dance. Lermantov embodies the bewitching power of the shoes of the fairy tale by attempting to use his powers of persuasion to get Vicky to choose to dance in the ballet over her relationship with Julian. This conflict of interests builds to a famous, climactic finish.

This film runs this week in QFT at the same time as ‘Citizen Kane’, another British classic. Although less famous than the other, I would suggest a fan of old classics to give ‘The Red Shoes’ a go as it is a bona fide masterpiece of escapism and pure story-telling which has inspired, among other things, an album by Kate Bush. It isn’t as widely available as ‘Citizen Kane’ and so the chance to see it remastered on the big screen is definitely not one to be passed up. So if your semester is coming to an end, why not take a couple of hours to yourself to sit back, relax and escape into the world of ‘The Red Shoes’?

‘The Red Shoes’ is screening at QFT.

www.queensfilmtheatre.com

Tags: Gown, John McLean, newspaper, QFT, qub, Queen's, queen's university, student, The Gown, The Red Shoes

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Arts + Ents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.