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🦋 The Red Shoes

A beautiful but flawed movie, I think -- the flaw is in the plot, which is not interesting enough to keep me in my seat for 2½ hours. The beauty is (of course) to be found in the dancing, but this brings up a question for me: why is the main ballet sequence shot with special effects that could not happen on stage?

Filming stage presentations seems to me like a great idea; I really like e.g. what Bergman did with it in The Magic Flute. When Craster is conducting the overture and the camera is showing the confusion backstage, that was what I thought was going to happen -- self-aware cinematography of the company's presentation of The Red Shoes. Instead I got a fantasia of what the ballet might look like in a movie, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Is this a depiction of what is going on in the dancers' heads? In the audience's head? In the director's head? It's definitely not what's going on on stage and I think that takes away from the movie.

posted evening of Saturday, June 7th, 2008
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