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The Red Shoes (1948)
- Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
- Music by Brian Easdale
Choreography by Robert Helpmann
*SPOILER FREE
Audience: Why The Red Shoes?
Cinema: Why art?
Audience: Well we don't know exactly why, but it's a must.
Cinema: That's my answer too.
The Red shoes is a music romantic-drama following Victoria, an aspiring ballerina as she falls in love with her composer, Julian, who sets her up as a rising star. Victoria must choose between her career and her love.
This is a story of passion and obsession, the perfection and the agony that stand in the way between one's glory and heart.
Based on the fairy tale "The Red Shoes" by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Anderson. This is as Shakespearean as Romeo and Juliet.
The performances are outstandingly pulled off that you begin to wonder whether they're great choreographers who act very well or they're great actors who dance very well.
The music is so marvelously composed by Brian Easdale and breathtakingly conducted by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
You loose yourself into a prolonged climactic dancing sequence as if you were actually there in that theater attending the live event.
The production design, the color pallets, the costumes and the make-up, the cinematography and the montages, the lots of red and the bit of Tchaikovsky. This is a cinematic masterpiece like nothing you have experienced before.
The Red Shoes is a song and dance, a ballad of a boy and a girl who fall in love, an exquisite artistic achievement in sight and sound.
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Available to watch on HBO Max, The Criterion Collection, and on Amazon Prime Video
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First published on LinkedIn as part of #hamzeh101.