The Red Shoes

I watched and liked, in fits and starts, the Tales of Hoffman- it's a pure opera, but the movie is an opera mixed with ballet, and it captured me with the same sort of spirit a music video sometimes does, the mixture of sound and motion becoming something new and fascinating. I had heard from a lot of people that the Red Shoes was the masterpiece that Hoffman was following up on, and... I was let down. It's not a bad movie at all, it just doesn't work as well for me as either Hoffman or Black Narcissus- I spent the whole movie waiting for the ballet sequence, sitting through the backstage shenanigans, and then the ballet itself seemed less unhinged and less cinematic than Hoffman. Towards the end, though, the power of the narrative began to come together, and the heroine's choice between art and life is a deep enough one that what came before it is almost retroactively interesting.

Immediately after finishing, I was considering whether it was an anti-feminist movie or not- I had thought it was a choice between submissive domesticity and the freedom of art, but from my brief description, Grace felt that it was essentially a story of a woman choosing which male will dominate her. In arguing the point, I came strongly to embrace the side that the satanic impressario figure was tempting her to dance, but that he was not in control of her when she made her decision, nor when she danced- he was tempting her to revel in her highest self, to forsake the world for art. The rather thinly defined love interest had nothing on that. Some of the external information backed that up, too- the screenwriter described it as a movie arguing that it was worth dying for art, which validates her decision.

The novelization, however, does not- written by Pressburger, it consistently vilifies the impressario, making him not merely a tempter but a controller, the man pulling the strings for all the dancers. The art the ballerina dies for is thus not hers, but a function of his greater art, a glorification of him. And her love interest too comes off badly, rejecting her angrily when she begs him to let her dance one more night, to save face in front of her friends. He is imperious, and her desire to throw herself to him is somewhat inexplicable. It goes from a sort of Faustian story of a woman who consciously chooses to throw away the trappings of mortality for the promise of the greatest art she can imagine to one of vacillating between a 'good' man- a proper man, one who will make a nice bourgeois household with her- and an evil one, who wants to use her for her body.

The fairy tale is worse. It's awful. A little girl is cursed for her 'pride', her desire to look nice and her feeling of independence, to dance until her feet bleed, until her adopted mother dies, and until she begs to have her feet cut off. Even then she is not sufficiently humbled, and her mocking feet dance before her, barring her way. She must become utterly the female gender role, utterly humbled, utterly subservient, before she is allowed any grace. And the sexual subtext of dancing makes the story even more repellent, implying that as punishment for desire, she must become a prostitute until she is castrated.

Nonetheless, I think the movie itself is not nearly so anti-feminist as all this would imply, by strength of the ballet and Moira Shearer's exultation in dancing it- the movie falls in love with her when she dances, and is bored by everything else, so eventually the movie defies its own message in the same way war movies often do- the audience doesn't give a damn for her love interest, nor for what the filmmakers claim to say (and I don't really believe they had any investment in what they were claiming to say either), it is the ballerina who is in charge when she dances, and nothing is worth taking her away from that.