Movie Review : Kate Bush Toes ‘The Line’ With Aplomb : The 50-minute musical fantasy features the art-rock singer in a loose remake of ‘The Red Shoes.’

Kate Bush has always seemed like a true sensualist trapped in an English art-rock singer’s overcerebral body. She makes hay of that tension by casting herself in a very loose remake of “The Red Shoes,” adapted into her self-directed 50-minute musical fantasy “The Line, the Cross, the Curve” (opening today for two days at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, with a Laurie Anderson film).

The singer plays herself as a pop star whose yearning to be a great dancer, too, tempts her to take on the demonized shoes that’ll turn her into a terminally twinkle-toed Moira Shearer sort, dancing unto death. Miranda Richardson is the bewitched ballerina who steps out of a rehearsal-hall mirror to foist off the snazzy footwear. Soon Bush is laced up and pirouetting uncontrollably back through that mirror--Moira in Wonderland?--into a fantasy world full of symbolic obstacles and quickie quests, hoofing a path through six songs from last year’s “Red Shoes” album.

Obviously Bush isn’t about to improve upon the classic 1948 Michael Powell film that was her inspiration, or for that matter on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that was Powell’s. But Powell might approve of her filmmaking’s richly lit, darkly colorful leitmotifs. And Bush is less interested in homage than using the shoe shtick as launch pad for a series of independent, increasingly surreal music-vid vignettes.

Even for those of us outside the cult of Kate, a good deal of the indulgence pays off. There’s a surprisingly haunted resonance in the combination of romanticism and mortality in some numbers, especially “Moments of Pleasure,” which has Bush swirling past a gauntlet of the dearly departed in a snowstorm somewhere high above Manhattan (!). Elsewhere she gets to shimmy with aplomb, of course--not Shearer, but not bad. Entranced and trouncing through mounds of fresh fruit in her red shoes near the climax, she’s an agreeably earthy etherealist.