With rain lashing outside, festival goers shuffled into the cozy confines of the GFT and treated themselves to an incredible cinematic delight courtesy of British film icons Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. There is little I can say as a critic to elevate the grace and charm of The Tales of Hoffman. I can only confirm what has been known for years (it’s breathtaking) and add that the restored print, made possible by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, is outstanding.
Powell and Pressburger made cinematic love letters. They were imbued with contagious enthusiasm for their subjects, but tempered by a world weariness that make them unlike other filmmakers of their time. The Red Shoes and Hoffman are indicative of this approach; the sumptuous aesthetics can’t trump the tragedy that befalls their heroes. Hoffman sees the eponymous protagonist (Robert Rounseville) regale rowdy students during the interval of a ballet with stories of the three great loves of his life, all of which slipped through his fingers because of an uncannily similar face of evil (Robert Helpmann). The three loves are Olympia (Moira Shearer), Guilietta (Ludmilla Tchérina) and Antonia (Ann Ayars), and all are sung and danced to perfection, but it’s Moira Shearer’s automaton who is the strongest of the female performances. After her departure from the screen there is a noticeable void that has you longing for her return.
As gorgeous as the music and performances are though, the real star of this restoration is the Academy Award nominated art direction and costume design from Hein Heckroth. There’s a homespun quality to the aesthetic of the film, Heckroth expanding on techniques employed in The Red Shoes: raw brush strokes, swaths of diaphanous fabric, jewel tones and storybook grandeur – it has the same technicolour sweetness you’d find in a Disney film of the era. Through ingenuous cinematography, cavernous sound stages were transformed into the cinematic equivalent of a pop-up book. It’s so rare for theatre pieces transcend their proscenium confines, but this achieves it in spades.