The Red Shoes (1948)

 

The Red Shoes makes sure we know where the characters are, but does not create a strong sense of place.  For a film that travels all over the globe, it is strangely uninterested in capturing local detail.  We remain with the members of the Ballet Lermontov, backstage or in private spaces, in modes they expose to each other but not to the public eye.  They share a rapport that isn’t entirely comprehensible to outsiders.  

 

The high-class decor and the sumptuous colors are beautiful, but highly artificial.  It eschews realism in favor of exaggerated dialogue, performance, and design.  When the main character Victoria goes to meet with the impresario Boris Lermontov, she silently ascends a large staircase overgrown with plants, with a blue dress flowing behind her.  We don't need to see this, except to luxuriate in a place where most people would never get to go.  While the insularity of the characters' social world speaks to the exclusivity of status in this film, it also contributes to the avoidance of realism. 

The insularity of the film is not just about keeping reality at a distance, but also about the close-knit nature of Lermontov's inner circle and its reception of outsiders.  Lermontov calls his artists his "family," and one senses the long history and insider knowledge between them.  With the exception of conductor Livingstone, they all share a nationality.  

To be sure though, Lermontov's allegiance isn't to any nation.  He styles himself foremost as a mystic of art, describing ballet as his “religion,” and he demands his artists treat it as such. There can be no compromises.  If a dancer struggles with the tempo of the music, she must simply learn to dance faster.  When his prima ballerina, Boronskaya, announces her intention to leave the Ballet Lermontov to get married, Lermontov treats her with extreme coldness.  After Boronskaya leaves, he does more than hire a replacement.  He commissions a ballet that reflects his own beliefs about art—The Ballet of the Red Shoes—and casts the replacement in the lead role.  Such fantastic gestures and fixation on virtuous suffering are the price of admission to his sealed-off world.  

The hallucinatory quality waxes and wanes over the course of the film.  The first half of the film is our slow induction into Lermontov's inner circle, following the two new members Julian and Victoria.  They both start out as audience members, in a realm closer to our own, and learn over time how to fit in with Lermontov's gang.  The second half is the anticipation, never to be satisfied, of returning to the high reached in the middle of the film in the Ballet of the Red Shoes sequence.  

The performance of The Ballet of the Red Shoes is where it has the strongest impression of taking place inside someone's mind.  For fifteen minutes, the film departs for a world of psychedelic, melting landscapes.  It makes subtle, nearly imperceptible use of slow motion to extend the leaps in Victoria’s dance, making them lighter, free from physics.  When the audience applauds, they are swallowed by an ocean that floods the auditorium, the sound of their applause subsumed into the ballet’s world, transformed into the sound of breaking waves. 

At the time of the film's release, some criticized this scene for failing to properly pay respect to ballet, for taking the focus off of the physical feats in favor of cinema-of-attractions.  They may have a point—perhaps a film about ballet should be more interested in ballet.  But it's important for this scene to be the height of unreality.  It sets the characters' trajectory for the rest of the film.  We never see anything like it again for the rest of the film.  The characters never again manage to reach the same high, but keep crawling back. 

The sensuous artificiality and the charisma of the main characters offers us an experience of giving into subjectivity, and of delving into the methods of realizing intense experiences.  Compulsion comes from the morass of things that provoke us: the beauty of aristocratic fashions and environments, feats of immense physical difficulty, swooning music, status and pride, and romantic love.  You could even include food, given the memorably colorful and luxurious meals the film depicts on a few occasions.  But accepting that these things are at the heart of human motivation doesn't mix with Lermontov's claims of divine purity.

The members of the Ballet Lermontov benefit from opening themselves up to each other, but in doing so they also become susceptible to profound disappointment. Julian and Lermontov catalyze each other's worst traits, and in the end we find their cruelty is bitterly mundane and recognizable.