Stiletto

Luis García Berlanga. Cinema director. Valencia, 1921 - Madrid 2010

 

Howard Levy tells a story about how T’hung Hui Nam, husband of Mrs T’hung, summarised his fascination for the tiny lotus foot of the latter, commenting that the bandage-deformed foot was not only beautiful in itself but also exciting, in that it limited the woman’s movement. / Therein, I think, lies one of the great secrets of the female power of seduction - the limitation - as opposed to absence - of movement. / Almost all the weapons in the fetishist armoury are tricks employed by women to feign a certain inability to move in a well-defined context. / The appearance, however, must be fleeting. Thus, the gazelle’s feet and graceful, rapid legs create the impression among hunters that they only touch the ground in a single spot, while at the same time sustaining the svelte, graceful body in harmonious balance. So, to evoke that image of impossible weightlessness with even greater ambiguity, women have made their own that creation of Louis XIV and his court, which accentuates the necessary appearance of instability, and which was originally intended for men: I mean of course the high heel. / Here then, in all the glory of what we know as “femininity”, we have the coy, the exquisite lady. Now, it only remains to shoot our fiery darts at the vulnerable points and await the gleam of seduction. / Before such ardour, a parade of this impossible equilibrium, just the right degree of uncertainty, all the fragility of a pendulous, undulating architecture. The central axis is the ankle, incredibly equine, dotted by light cavities of which our lips dream, and sharp protuberances our fingers wish avidly to caress. Little surprise that Leonardo da Vinci should have said that the foot is an engineering masterpiece in which each piece facilitates different rotations, and each step creates a universe. Indeed, seen from behind, a woman walking in stiletto heels is little short of a prodigy. And if, like Marilyn, she should suddenly turn and smile at her own misfortune, the moment becomes cosmic, if not orgasmic. And then you understand that the female foot leads, again and again, to the irresistible rise of the Fallen Angel, a rise we also see all the more clearly, and therefore, with less morbid fascination in any classical ballerina. / The stiletto heel, then, defined by Oscar Tusquets and by yours truly as the most beautiful, and best designed object in the world, with the marvellous precariousness it confers on movement, not only adds vertiginous height to the woman but also places her on a pedestal as if she were a tyrant to be overthrown or a mythological goddess before whom we must kneel in adoration. / However, we are not the only ones to share this passion. The heel, along with the shoe in general, has occupied a central role in novels by writers ranging from Restif de Bretonne to Almudena Grandes, and including, Goethe, Arthur Miller, and Oliver Curwood, among many others. It has been admired and painted by Allan Jones, John Willie, Andy Warhol, Pierre Molinier and Dalí, to mention just a few. David Griffith was the owner of an enormous collection of women’s shoes, Cecil B. De Mille selected his actresses on the basis of their footwear and the great French actor Raimu declared that une femme sans talons c’est une femme sans talent. The great Mercedes d’Acosta, the most seductive lesbian of all Hollywood’s mythological stars and of all America’s celebrated millionaires, is now part of the New York Metropolitan Museum’s patrimony. From her we have: “A shoe without sex-appeal is like a tree without leaves.”

With Luis García Berlanga and Charo López in 1994.