Ina documentary filmed as she travelled the world in her eightieth year, Margaret Atwood recalls a cinema trip to celebrate a friend’s ninth birthday. The film she saw was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). ‘The grown-ups evidently thought little girls like ballet; they will like this movie,’ she remarks, tacitly acknowledging that this haunting tale of a young dancer driven to suicide is a strange choice for a children’s party.
While the film’s main plot traces the outline of Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1845 fairy tale, the central character also dances the lead role in a 17-minute ‘play-within-a-play’ sequence called The Ballet of the Red Shoes, in a metatheatrical twist. Andersen’s story is a Christian morality story of temptation, punishment and redemption. Proud and vain, a young peasant girl so covets a pair of beautiful shoes that she neglects her familial and religious duties. Humbled and punished, Karen eventually begs for her feet to be chopped off with an axe, whereupon the cursed red shoes — still containing her feet — dance off into the forest. After receiving replacement wooden feet and crutches and learning the value of true repentance, Karen’s heart bursts and she enters heaven.
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