Summary
Vicky and Julian are shown at night, lying in separate beds. Julian cannot sleep, so he excuses himself to play a composition on the piano. Vicky, too, lies awake, and in Julian's absence, she goes to her mirror and observes herself as she cradles a pair of pointe shoes. She then runs to the piano and rejoins Julian, hugging him close. However, this sentiment doesn't last long, as a poster announces her return to dance in The Red Shoes once more.
Vicky is next seen in her dressing room, warming up for a performance and listening to the radio to hear Julian's original opera. Just as Julian's opera performance is scheduled to begin, an emergency broadcast announces that he has fallen ill and the performance will not take place. Before Vicky (or the audience) has much time to worry about him, he suddenly appears in her dressing room, as some ominous music begins to sound. He confronts her: "I wondered if I'd find you here." We learn that she did not tell him that she had come back to the Ballet Lermontov, and he urgently begs her to walk out and catch a train to London with her. She begs him to wait until after the performance, agreeing to leave with him only if she can dance again first.
Julian is angry, caught up in a misunderstanding: he believes that, by agreeing to rejoin the company, Vicky has indicated her loyalty to Lermontov over him. She desperately attempts to undo the misunderstanding, trying to explain that she only capitulated because she loved ballet, not because she no longer loved him. However, before she can properly express herself, Lermontov enters, taunting Julian with the fact that Vicky has apparently chosen dance—and, by extension, Lermontov himself—over their marriage.
While Julian's initial read on the situation may have been an incorrect assessment of Vicky's intentions, Lermontov's ego-driven provocation confirms Julian's fear that the two men are still competing for Vicky's loyalty. While Vicky maintains that she has not left Julian, Lermontov claims that she has, maintaining that she cannot be both a wife and a ballet star. She cries that she loves Julian, and Lermontov confirms that he was jealous of this affection, but his confession is hardly a show of vulnerability. After having persuaded Vicky to return, it is clear that he has the upper hand, and he taunts Vicky by reminding her of how unhappy she would be as a housewife.
It is then Julian's turn to offer an ultimatum: either Vicky can leave with him before the performance and run away to begin a new life together far away from Lermontov and his pressures, or their marriage is over. She cannot bring herself to leave with Julian, and he storms out angrily. Unable to choose between dancing and Julian, Vicky breaks down in distress. Lermontov interprets this as a victory and sticks around the dressing room for a moment to brag, before leaving to introduce the revival performance of The Red Shoes.
Vicky is in costume, identical to the one she wore in the original performance, but her expression is one of intense distress. In a moment of chaos, a dresser who is walking her to the stage loses track of her, and she runs in the opposite direction. Before her intentions are clear, we see the orchestra performing the overture to the ballet. She runs downstairs, and her rapidly moving feet are intercut with footage of the orchestra playing vigorously and of Julian walking towards the train. Suddenly, he turns to look back, running back towards the opera house. As he turns around, he sees Vicky jump off a balcony, and into the path of the train. It is unclear whether this is a suicide, prompted by the loss of Vicky's true love, or an act compelled by the costume's red shoes, as in the fairytale. Julian rushes to her side, performing one final act of devotion: as she dies, he removes the red shoes from her feet.
Lermontov hears of Vicky's death just as he begins to introduce the performance. He announces that, while Vicky will not dance that night or ever again, the ballet will be performed one final time, without her or any understudy in her place, as "she would have wished it." An eerie performance results, as a single spotlight underscores the emptiness of the stage in her absence. On this spooky note, the credits begin to roll.
Analysis
As the "honeymoon stage" of their romance wears off, both Vicky and Julian are shown growing restless. Although their separate beds were likely a necessary concession to the production codes that forbade the depiction of intimacy (even between married characters), they also represent a growing distance between the couple. When neither can sleep, they both gravitate towards their respective arts, as if to question whether they made the right choice by essentially abandoning their careers to be together.
However, when Vicky rejoins Julian as he plays the piano, it is clear that she is moved by her love for him. As she puts down her ballet shoes and rushes to his side, she visually represents her agreement to be his subservient wife, giving up her career in order to support his. Of course, she quickly breaks free from this subservient position by rejoining Lermontov's company, which helps to explain why Julian understands her return to dancing as an intention to renege on the terms of their relationship.
The film culminates in Vicky's tragic death, which parallels the ending of the ballet version of The Red Shoes. When the film ends this way, the viewer is prompted to look back at the earlier parts of the film and reevaluate the other potential similarities between Vicky's story and the fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson. One parallel emerges from this comparison between Lermontov and the evil shoemaker, or perhaps between Lermontov and the red shoes themselves. Each is the agent of the protagonist's demise, forcing the once-enthusiastic young ballerina under their control to meet an impossible standard of dedication, leading to her eventual downfall.
By the end of the film, it is unclear whether Lermontov's character has been redeemed: he remains ambiguous, somewhere between an evil, controlling genius and a hurt, sad, lonely man. As he introduces the final performance, he appears distressed at Vicky's death, although it remains uncertain whether he is sad because he genuinely mourns her, or whether he's just concerned for the future of his company without the prima ballerina he fought so hard for.
Similarly, Julian occupies some indeterminate middle territory between being Vicky's pure, kind savior, and just being a jealous husband whose possessiveness contributed to her undoing. Unable to locate any one specific character as the sole agent responsible for Vicky's death, the viewer is forced to confront the fact that her demise was caused by a broader set of social forces: she was, in effect, killed by the insurmountable expectations and pressures placed upon her, caught in the tension caused by a prevailing belief that women can never "have it all."
The editing in the last scene is an example of the technique D.W. Griffith invented called parallel montage, in which events in two different places are edited together to indicate that they are taking place simultaneously, creating unity in time across space. This editing technique also builds a sense of urgency by matching the orchestra's crescendoing music with Vicky's rapidly moving feet, creating the sense that something bad is about to happen as Julian turns back towards the opera house. However, this sequence of parallel montage does not last as long as the examples that Griffith himself was famous for, such as the rescue sequence at the end of Birth of a Nation. Nonetheless, Powell and Pressburger's use of the technique creates a compelling, gripping climax to the film, which, unlike the more narratively formulaic films pioneered by Griffith, controversially ends in sadness.
