Big Picture: The Red Shoes (1948)
- Presented By: Tampa Theatre
- Dates: April 16, 2025
- Time: 8:00 PM
- 711 N Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
- Price: $7-$10
Tampa Theatre
For the next subject of our new monthly Big Picture series, Tampa Theatre offers Dancing, Through Life: a selection of films that all center the experience of dance as a method of escape — escape from a difficult life, escape from an adversarial world, even transcendent escape from the mundane into ecstatic beauty.
Big Picture: The Red Shoes (1948)
Watch The Red Shoes a hundred times, and it will show you a different face each viewing. Directed by the famous British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it opens with a Lisztomaniacal horde of music students clamoring for their instructor, Professor Palmer, at the debut of the new ballet Hearts of Fire by the Ballet Lermontov. But soon, disillusionment: the professor has plagiarized the work of Julian Craster, one of the students, and he storms out. The ballet’s producer, Boris Lermontov, hears Julian’s complaints and hires him, since he’s already proved he’s a good composer; meanwhile Boris must also replace his lead dancer, and chooses Victoria Page, who impressed him with her performance in Swan Lake.
Lermontov casts Vicky in the lead of a new show, The Ballet of the Red Shoes, based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about a dancer who is cursed for her vanity by a pair of red pointe shoes. And Julian and Vicky, naturally, fall in love, all in lush dreamlike Technicolor. If next you read that Lermontov grows envious of the relationship between Julian and Vicky and tries to tear them apart, you may think you know what’s coming. You may expect Lermontov’s poisonous jealousy to be erotically charged — but it’s not. Not exactly. He desires her, and that desire warps him (as any desire that’s strong enough will). But his desire is for what she can do, not what she can give him. The distinction hardly matters unless you’re Vicky. For Vicky, though, it’s the only thing that matters. Because she, too, has accepted the bargain of the Red Shoes — if you wish to dance, then you will dance until you die. And so to stop dancing is a death before death, an unthinkable submission of the spirit.