red velvet curtain
8 titles
Films with a red curtain on screen: a nightclub singer stands in front of one, a whole room is hung in crimson, and a ballerina stands beside one in costume. Four of the eight are David Lynch's.
The Red Shoes (1948) is the earliest film here. Vicky Page, an aspiring ballerina, is torn between her dedication to dance and her desire to love, and the stages she dances on hang red velvet curtains with gold fringe.
Nearly four decades on, David Lynch put the curtain behind a nightclub singer. In Blue Velvet, a college student follows a severed ear he finds in a field to a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens, who sings in front of a red curtain. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the Red Room is an entire room hung with red curtains, in a film about the last week of a teenage girl's life in Twin Peaks, Washington. In Lost Highway, the saxophonist Fred Madison lives in a house hung with red curtains and is accused of murdering his wife Renee.
In Showgirls, Nomi Malone arrives in Las Vegas determined to make a name as a dancer, and her stage numbers play in front of red stage curtains.
Three more films sit under a name that has the curtain in it: Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! were boxed together in 2002 as the Red Curtain Trilogy. Moulin Rouge! is the one on this shelf, and it opens on a stage with red velvet curtains parting for the studio fanfare. A young poet then walks into the Parisian nightclub of the title at the turn of the twentieth century and begins a passionate affair with its star.
Mulholland Drive is Lynch's fourth film here. A hopeful actress has only just arrived in Hollywood when she meets a woman with amnesia, and in the Club Silencio scene a singer appears from behind red curtains to perform. Black Swan is by neither director. In it, Nina, a ballerina in a New York company, is the first choice to dance the lead in Swan Lake, and the film puts her in costume beside a red curtain.
You watch all eight with one eye on the curtain.
