The Red Shoes

‘I'm against naturalism, on the whole,’ Michael Powell formulates his creed and stages a melodrama against pettiness, decency and mundane probability with the seductive palette of Technicolor and the fervour of cinema. The image of images from Monte Carlo: an apricot sky above a green, silky, hazy sea in the eyelid of an arched window, a complete artificiality. A melodrama that makes Hollywood pale in comparison, crowned by the grand, surreal ballet sequence that stylises the romantic theme of art, love and death even more magnificently – in an ecstasy of swirling aquamarine, sepia, saffron and scarlet. Forms, backgrounds and movements change incessantly, the camera falls into the vortex, begins to pirouette, until longing and fate become one in a fleeting moment snatched from transience. (H.T.)