Due to the unexpected arrival of Neal Stephenson, nineweaving and I watched the latest installment of Powell and Pressburger early this afternoon: The Red Shoes and "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), since Black Narcissus didn't fit into the schedule. I am extraordinarily tired, so my comments will be brief.

If Colpeper is a Kentish Dionysos, Boris Lermontov [Anton Wolbrook] might be the dancer's Mephistopheles.

For all of Lermontov's alignment with the diabolical, both through his role in the film and his likeness to the grotesque shoemaker in The Ballet of the Red Shoes, in the end I had more sympathy for him than for Marius Goring's Julian Craster. The impresario's part in Victoria's death has to do entirely with his inability to see people as people rather than raw material for art—he urges her to put on the red shoes again, but with no intention that she should dance herself to her doom. She is his masterwork. He did not bar her from dancing when she left the Ballet Lermontov to marry Julian, even if her choice infuriated and bewildered him. When he thinks he's persuaded her back into the company, he flings up his hands in the triumphant gesture that the ballet-master Grischa Ljubov (Léonide Massine, in a casting choice that Weirdie and Beardie the Balletomanes would appreciate) uses for the shoemaker, but where that character merrily steals away with the fatal red shoes at the ballet's close, to proffer them to the audience as though to his next victim, Victoria's death is a thunder-strike to Lermontov: his faultless velvet and whip-crack voice tears rawly as he dedicates this last performance to her memory, from which he may never recover. He has always seen himself as the puppet-master, the doll-maker, the man who stands outside the stories and chooses a role here, a role there: I don't think he understands until the very end that he too is trapped inside a story, and that there are forces more powerful than he in the dancer's world.

In contrast, Julian, who at first appears such a match for Victoria in his youth and fire for his art, is ultimately limited in unexpected ways. As a composer in love, he should understand his wife's need to dance, not merely to retreat into the background of her husband's career. But there is a piano for him to play on when he wakes restlessly in the night; her shoes are all stored like keepsakes in the bottom dresser drawer. Even his romantic reverie of a time when, as an old man, he will be able to speak dreamily of the happiness he had somewhere on the Mediterranean with the famous dancer Victoria Page, has an ominous note in retrospect. "Then she was quite young, comparatively unspoilt. We were, I remember, very much in love." Note the past tense: if she in the future is a famous dancer, it is presupposed that their love affair did not last. And he is very much in love with her, that is undeniable. But he does not comprehend what drives her, or he chooses to gloss it over. At least when Lermontov presses Victoria to give up her married life, he seems genuinely not to realize the sacrifice he's asking of her. For him, love is a "doubtful comfort" that he accepts in a temperamental talent like Irina Boronskaja (Ludmilla Tchérina), but that he mistakenly believed a dancer of Victoria's passion was immune to: he reflected himself in her. Julian does not even question that he should have both a career and a wife: he has no excuse.

(My mother, on the other hand, who saw The Red Shoes at a film festival at the University of Oklahoma when she was in high school, felt worse for Julian: because it is terrible to lose someone in the middle of a fight, and she always thought that their professional and personal lives might not have been unsalvageable otherwise. With the latter sentiment, she has a point. Outside of the rules of fairy tales, it's nonsensical that Victoria should have no space between love or art but death—but as a triad, what a story they make!)

Lastly, I love that The Ballet of the Red Shoes, as presented to the audience of the film, is impossible. Perhaps we're meant to take it as a representation of Victoria's perceptions of the experience—the demonic shoemaker, frozen like a predatory cutout, flickers with the faces of Lermontov and Julian; three dancers upraised are seen as flowers, white birds, clouds, the images that Julian promised she would hear in the music; the crash of waves on the shore resolves into the theater audience's applause—but that doesn't explain the reflection of herself that pirouettes in the shoemaker's window, the mazelike corridors and the cellophane cutouts into which the corps de ballet crumple, the blowing newspaper that bellies into a three-dimensional lover and the nightmares that swarm out of a darkness vaster than the stage, the promontories and desolate barrens on which she dances on the tireless red shoes. "Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by. But the red shoes go on." And that is precisely what we see, and it is terrifying.

And I am very fond of Grischa.

"I Know Where I'm Going!" surprised me, because it's a much more straightforward film than either The Red Shoes or A Canterbury Tale, and yet I am still thinking about it. As introduced by a mockumentary prologue, Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) is the precise opposite of Lady in the Dark's Jenny who couldn't make up her mind—a poised and determined young woman who arrives in the Inner Hebrides to marry money in the form of Consolidated Chemical Industries, otherwise known as Sir Robert Bellenger (Norman Shelley, although we never do see him: a brief exchange over the wireless tells the audience, and Joan, pretty much all there is to know), only to find her plans derailed for perhaps the first time in her life; the weather in the west of Scotland is unpredictable, and so is her attraction to Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), a naval officer on eight days' leave and incidentally the Laird of Kiloran, the small island on which Joan's fiancé is waiting, currently inaccessible with the rough sea and the gales. There's no suspense about how this triangle will turn out. I know who I love, but the dear knows who I'll marry . . . But I'm oddly not sure that romance is the point of the story. The place in which the romance happens might be.

Characters speak in Gaelic and their dialogue is not translated. (The name of Finlay Currie's harbormaster is even written, in the credits, "Ruairidh Mor." This wins points with me.) The sea and the sky and the craggy hillsides are filmed in the same lovely detail as Joan's face when she counts the roof-beams to make a wish on, or the stamp and whirl of a céilidh held to celebrate the sixty-year anniversary of a local couple, or Torquil kneeling in the bracken with a spyglass, sighting for his "godson," a half-tamed golden eagle. He himself is regularly referred to as "Kiloran," which may be a perfectly proper form of address, but at the same time reinforces the idea of Torquil as some embodiment of the landscape: so that Joan does not fall in love only with him, his lanky face and his unexpectedly deep, husky voice that can boom like the tide when raised, but with the island that is his inheritance and sense of self. There's also Catriona Potts (Pamela Brown), who has the face of a white owl and makes her entrance striding in from the rain with a tumbling pack of wolfhounds, like an archer-goddess in a tweed skirt. With her husband stationed in the Middle East and her children boarded at school, she roams the hills to hunt rabbits for her houseguests, fierce and luminous and practical and she, not Torquil, registered for me as the most potently mythic presence in the film: perhaps all the more so because she has no connection with the folklore of the islands, the curse on the MacNeils or the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. I looked at her halfway through the film and thought, She wants to be owls, not flowers.

And there are the touches of sheer weirdness, like the smokestack top hat or Joan's dream as the train carries her toward the Hebrides, of her father in minister's garb marrying her to photonegative engines of industry as a miniature train winds in and out of a stitched-up tartan landscape, the wheels chattering "Lady Bellenger . . . Lady Bellenger . . ." Dreams on film often feel too clearly symbolic, shorthand for the subconscious. Powell and Pressburger's have a real sense of what the hell? Even when the characters are awake.

I should be asleep. I see from my profile that I am losing friends-of at a fearsome rate: three or four in the last couple of days. What am I supposed to be talking about? The obsessions you see are the obsessions you get . . .