Lords of the dance
Once again, we’re into the arena of films that are perhaps impossible to overpraise, as a completely restored print of The Red Shoes (1948) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (‘The Archers’) begins its UK re-release.
2009 has been one of the best years in living memory for the opportunities it has offered UK audiences to rediscover classics in their rightful home, and ‘classic’ only begins to describe what this masterpiece has to offer.
Taking as its central tenet the notion that real art takes sacrifice, pain, and sublimation of personal desires, and the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a girl who finds that she can’t stop dancing once she dons the eponymous footwear as its inspiration, the story revolves around Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), an urbane, ruthless but charismatic impressario of the Ballet Lermontov, and his ambitions for aspiring ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer): “Don’t forget, a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit.”
The film’s coup de cinema comes with its centrepiece ballet, which was written for the film and staged by the mainly professional ballet dancers, including Shearer, who made up the cast. Incredibly, the 15-minute sequence is not filmed as from the perspective of an audience, but rather revolves around a constantly mobile perspective, mimicking what a dancer would see an experience on stage, that takes viewer into the heart of the dance as never before or since.
As with many films from the Powell-Pressburger stable, this was disdainfully received at first by critics but, as with all true classics, its reputation has only grown with the passing of the years, such that it is now quite rightly recognized as one of the most influential films ever made.
A movie experience unlike any other – it must be seen.
136 mins. In English and French.
