Criterion Challenge week 10: The Red Shoes (1948)
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Criterion Challenge is an annual film challenge hosted by users of Letterboxd. The goal is to watch a different movie from the Criterion Collection every week for a year, selected to fulfill 52 different weekly prompts. Last week (week nine), I watched Bringing Up Baby (1938) to satisfy the prompt: the 1930s.
The Criterion Closet is a physical closet owned by the collection, housed in New York City. It contains more than 1700 physical copies of films. In 2024, Criterion even created a mobile version of the closest: an 18-foot van that visitors of film festivals across the country could purchase films out of.
In 2010, Criterion started their video series “Closet Picks,” where actors, directors, and filmmakers are filmed rifling through the closet, picking out their favorite films. The first video featured filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and ever since they have filmed over 200 different people in the closet. Seven out of 52 of the challenges this year are to pick a movie from the list of someone else’s closet picks, with week 10’s theme being Andrew Garfield’s Closet Picks.
Andrew Garfield is an award-winning actor most known for his leading roles in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012-2014) films, as well as The Social Network (2010) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016). In his visit to the closest, he discusses contemporary British films, admires the work of directors he’s worked with, such as Terry Gilliam and David Fincher, and talks about movies beloved by his family. I chose to watch The Red Shoes (1948) from Garfield’s list of picks. Garfield shared an anecdote about how the film is one of director Martin Scorsese’s favorite films of all time and that he was the one to recommend it to Garfield.
The Red Shoes (1948) stars Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, a young woman who dreams of being a famous dancer, alongside Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), owner of a ballet company, and Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a young composer. Victoria manages to secure a spot in Lermontov’s ballet company, and when the star at the company retires to get married, she steps into the lead role of “The Red Shoes,” a new ballet composed by Craster. The ballet is based on a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen, where a spoiled young girl unknowingly buys cursed red shoes. Once she starts dancing in them, she can never stop, driving her to exhaustion and agony.
Victoria became famous after her magnificent performance in the show, achieving the star position in every ballet the company performed from then on. She is beautifully unstoppable —that is— until Lermontov discovers her secret romance with the composer, Craster. Lermontov fires the composer, and Victoria chooses to leave with her lover, seemingly giving up her dance career to marry him. At the end of the film, however, she returns to the ballet behind Craster’s back to perform “The Red Shoes.” Craster finds out and confronts her, giving her an ultimatum: him or the ballet. In the end, Victoria chooses the ballet over him.
This movie is absolutely beautiful. With a technicolor palette and ambitious design, it is sometimes almost visually overwhelming. The camera work during Victoria’s first dancing scene stood out to me in particular, rotating so fast I almost felt dizzy watching. The way the extended ballet scenes are filmed feels much more immersive than simply watching a performance in a theater ever could.
The set design and extravagant costuming create a captivating story, and the performances by the actors and dancers are incredible. My first thought at the beginning of the film was that actress Moira Shearer is stunning; her makeup and red hair are a definite eye-catcher in technicolor. The ending of this movie also left me stunned with a jaw-dropping scene.
Despite this film being older, the remaster work is fantastic, and no (obvious) visual issues are attributed to its age. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this film and can understand why it is a favorite of Scorcese’s and Garfield’s. I would recommend this film highly, and I ended up giving it five out of five stars.