Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell
1948
133 minutes
This is not The Red Shoe Diaries from the days of scrambled Skinemax porn. Nor is it The Red Balloon, the other artsy short film you'd always get this confused with. This is a pretty straightforward romantic drama movie with a ballet-within-a-film about the red shoes myth in question. The ballet section is most of the reason to watch the film. It's directed by the same director(s) who did the film version of Tales of Hoffmann, one of your favorite films of all time.
You've long been a fan of dance, though to be honest it took you a little longer to warm up to the kind of dance where the women keep their clothes on. You've seen plenty of both types. You have a particular fondness for Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, of course. You also had the good fortune to attend a modern dance ballet interpretation of Frank Herbert's Dune, which was particularly well-done. This gives you a pang as you remember the halcyon days of Artscape, when they crammed more high culture programming into the schedule with classical concerts, ballet and modern dance, et cetera.
Your father often joked about "going to the ballet" when you were a teenager, which you took to mean going to a strip club. This was at least a yearly occurrence when he lived in Indianapolis, since he was expected to tag along on outings to the racetrack with co-workers and customers at work when the race was in town. He also took you on your first outing to a strip club when you were eighteen on a work trip to Montreal, where you were able to both drink and go to a rather upscale strip club. On this same night you also had one of the best meals of your life at a fancy French restaurant in this city on the company's dime, a luxurious affair where you spent all evening drinking fancy wine and eating delicious fork-tender beef that melted like butter in your mouth. It was also the first time you had escargot. It was an evening of pleasant firsts, to say the least. Three years later you'd be able to tag along for outings to the racetrack and extracurriculars afterwards, which were a bit more tawdry.
A lot of your friends would later be horrified when you would talk openly about your dad dragging you out to strip clubs when you were in your teens and early twenties. But on the bright side it served a purpose. It drove home for you the fact that if all you cared about was physical beauty, this was readily available for rent at a pretty reasonable price--though you should still make sure to be respectful of those sharing it with you. Never let beauty alone get you tongue-tied and simple when dealing with women. And also remember that waitresses and other service employees are not strippers, and most of them aren't there for your visual enjoyment. Know which is which, and always be polite to both and assume that being flirty (when it happens) is merely part of their job, not a license for you to be a jerk to them.
And always tip your ballerinas.
Time to choose something different: