The dark heart of Pow­ell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes

True desire for what we want burns and yet we so often repress it. What is it that we real­ly, tru­ly want from life? It’s a recur­ring ques­tion at the heart of Michael Pow­ell and Emer­ic Pressburger’s films. Do you real­ly want to build a monastery in the Himalayas or are you run­ning from your own bro­ken heart? Do you real­ly want to get to that remote Scot­tish island where your rich fiancé resides or have you, in fact, fall­en for the local naval offi­cer on your jour­ney? Do you real­ly want to mar­ry the vil­lage par­son because you’re in love with him or is your thirst actu­al­ly for the dan­ger­ous land-own­ing gen­try who has an equal rel­ish for fox blood?

Desire and the ques­tions it pos­es are essen­tial to Black Nar­cis­sus, I Know Where I’m Going! and Gone to Earth – but none of them come to such trag­ic and telling con­clu­sions as Pow­ell and Pressburger’s 1948 film, The Red Shoes, where emo­tion­al and cre­ative desires are set as an impos­si­ble bina­ry that tears the main char­ac­ter apart.

The film fol­lows the career of dancer, Vic­to­ria Page (Moira Shear­er), as she ris­es through the ranks of a respect­ed bal­let com­pa­ny, Bal­let Ler­mon­tov, run by obses­sive direc­tor Boris Ler­mon­tov (Anton Wal­brook). Tak­ing an ear­ly chance on Page, Ler­mon­tov finds in her the poten­tial for a new star. He simul­ta­ne­ous­ly employs an up-and-com­ing new com­pos­er to his com­pa­ny too, Julian Cras­ter (Mar­ius Goring).

The trio go on to find huge suc­cess with their adap­ta­tion of Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s fairy tale ​‘The Red Shoes’, telling of a mag­i­cal pair of shoes that force their wear­er to dance on at the expense of all else. As the careers of the trio pro­gress­es, Page and Cras­ter fall in love, forc­ing Ler­mon­tov, who believes such a diver­sion will pro­duce aver­age work, to dis­miss them from the com­pa­ny. The oppor­tu­ni­ty aris­es lat­er for Page to return to danc­ing, lead­ing to her dilem­ma: amorous sat­is­fac­tion with Cras­ter or cre­ative sat­is­fac­tion with Lermontov.

Unlike the pairs oth­er films about desire, The Red Shoes has a cru­el streak as it sets two rea­son­able wants against one anoth­er. The film almost works as a ménage-a-trois, only with Ler­mon­tov rep­re­sent­ing some cre­ative crav­ing or ambi­tion rather than a sec­ondary sex­u­al or roman­tic one. It is dou­bly affect­ing in this sense as the very nar­ra­tive of the bal­let is itself about this same bina­ry and reflects the film’s core theme back on itself; the pow­er of the red shoes – a per­fect sym­bol of artis­tic dri­ve and ambi­tion – cross­ing over from the stage nar­ra­tive into the film narrative.

Pow­ell and Press­burg­er con­jure some bril­liant moments of dream-like visu­als, includ­ing the star­tling real­i­sa­tion of the bal­let itself in a huge, colour­ful set-piece. Such sur­re­al­ist moments go some way to mak­ing the heart of the dra­ma seem less bru­tal than it real­ly is. Page is forced into the impos­si­ble sit­u­a­tion of choos­ing mar­ried life with Cras­ter or the life of a dancer that, for most of the film, she has stat­ed as being what keeps her going. When Cras­ter asks her to take off the red shoes in the film’s final moments, the sym­bol­ism is no longer a cipher of her ambi­tion but her ambi­tion itself. It is some­thing he apt­ly can ask only when she is final­ly slip­ping away from this world.

Sim­i­lar­ly to Joan Web­ster (Wendy Hiller) in I Know Where I’m Going! there is a sense of inevitabil­i­ty about this. Once the ques­tions were posed about her true desire, it was always set to be impos­si­ble to live with either choice. Where­as Joan accepts the truth of her sin­gu­lar wants and reaps the rewards of a hap­py life, Page has only one des­ti­na­tion – the same as her stage char­ac­ter who dances on until all else, includ­ing her body, has fallen.

By the end of the film, the dilem­ma has bat­tered Page and left her as tat­tered and bruised as she is at the end of the bal­let. There’s a beau­ti­ful ambi­gu­i­ty to the end­ing that rein­forces this par­al­lel. After Cras­ter has walked out and is at Monte Car­lo train sta­tion wait­ing to go back home to Lon­don, Page runs out after him before falling towards an oncom­ing train. A mir­ror some­where reflect­ed light onto the shoes once more, hint­ing at their mag­i­cal qualities.

It is dif­fi­cult to read whether the shoes dragged her to her doom because of the impos­si­bil­i­ty of the choice or because they knew she had made such the choice to run back to Cras­ter. As Ler­mon­tov sug­gests, ​“Life rush­es by, but the red shoes dance on” either way. The Red Shoes employs a colour palette as bright and vivid as British cin­e­ma has ever dared go. But, under­neath this Tech­ni­col­or fable, like all the very best fairy tales, lies a dark heart that asks for the impossible.