the red shoes (1948)
“Why do you want to live?” At the center of Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece, The Red Shoes, is the question on existence and pursuit, on being and creation, to live in a constant striving after an ideal of beauty or perfection, or to allow that carriage driver to fall asleep in his seat, to let the horses go where they will and never ask the name of the place they’ve taken us to. Is it love that drives to a place of no name or devotion that drives toward the place that few can reach? It’s a place many will tell you doesn’t exist, yet in the mind of the creator that place is very real and only those who will sacrifice all else will know its name. Many make the choice to put on those red shoes before they can possibly comprehend the cost, to wear those red shoes is to live under a dictator, and like all who are ruled over the question looms, is it more terrifying to live under that rule, or to be freed of it? When the red shoes come off, the emptiness creeps in. In The Red Shoes there can be no master more heartless than ambition, it’s the voice that doesn’t let us sleep at night, that regards our most sacrificial efforts with a shrug of “not bad”, and who at once graces us with inspiration, only to leave us at the time when we need it most. As Lermontov puts it, “It is more disheartening to have to steal, than to be stolen from”. In this pursuit, it is those who’ve been abandoned by inspiration, the God to whom they gave all these sacrifices, that must resort to petty thievery, and admit defeat. We would do better to find some benevolent God, but for Lermontov, perhaps our true central character here, that God he’s chosen is unforgiving and unaccepting.
We never know when or where the light of inspiration will shine, for Vicky and for Lermontov it came one day unexpectedly on a wet Saturday afternoon at The Mercury Theater, in the most meager of surroundings. She felt the eyes of the master looking into her from the audience and danced as she never had before during a performance of Swan Lake.
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