Recently, TCM showed The Red Shoes, surely one of the greatest films ever made in color. You just have to see it to believe it. Some of the story elements drive me up a wall, like the fact that Vicky the star ballerina is caught between two inflexible, domineering men; but I guess that’s just the plot as it was in 1948.
The Red Shoes seems to me to be a combination of two things: one is the real life ballet impresario Diaghilev and his actual ballet dancer lover Nijinsky (whom Diaghilev ruined once Nijinsky had the impertinence to marry a woman), and the short story: The Yellow Wallpaper. Maybe I’m wrong, but look at the evidence.
I probably don’t need to elaborate much on the Diaghilev parallel, as I assume most people know it already. But for those who don’t, the great Russian ballet impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, the guy who made modern ballet what it is today, had a star ballet dancer, a man named Vaslav Nijinsky, and they became lovers. Well, Nijinsky was, at the time, the greatest ballet dancer who had ever lived, kind of like Pelé in soccer: in fact, the same things have been said of both, claiming when everyone jumped up, by the time everyone else had hit the ground, he was still rising into the air. (People claim that every great ballet dancer today can do everything Nijinsky could do, but he was never filmed dancing, so I wonder how the hell they can assert such a thing they clearly cannot possibly know.) And Nijinsky was the star of Diaghilev’s shows. But one time he came back from a holiday married, to a woman, and he was essentially blackballed from ballet. After trying to go solo, and some bad experiences he had from jealous rivals (some broken glass spread on a floor he was to dance on, when everyone knew he danced barefoot), Nijinsky literally went mad, and died a madman. I’ve read his diary: a disjointed paranoid missive that goes on for miles: a sad end to one of the world’s all-time great artists.
But nobody would have let them put a movie into theaters if it were about a gay couple, with prejudices being what they were at the time, so I believe they altered the storyline somewhat to include a ballerina, and less believably, an English one. (<But who in England would rush to the theater to see a movie about a Russian ballerina? So, as you can see, some artistic license had to be taken with the story.)
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned it before, but it strikes me how similar in basic storyline and theme The Red Shoes and The Yellow Wallpaper are. In fact, both titles have three words, both begin with the article “The”, both follow with a color (“Red” or “Yellow”), both end with things (“Shoes” or “Wallpaper”), and taken as a whole, both titles describe the thing the female protagonist becomes trapped in, driving them to madness and ending the story. (I know the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper thinks she has been freed, but really she’s become trapped.) And the storyline, boiled down to its bare minimum, is the same for both: possessive husband wants to prevent his creative and energetic wife from pursuing her work/art, and it destroys her. (I know: The Red Shoes existed before as a fairy tale, but it didn’t have this oppressive husband/feminist angle that fits so well with The Yellow Wallpaper.)
Maybe I’m off-base here, but I don’t think so. Look at the history of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, read The Yellow Wallpaper, and watch the movie The Red Shoes again, and I think you’ll see that I’m onto something here.
