White Nights Movie Review

When Maria Schell, then 31, and Marcello Mastroianni, then 34, played Natalia and Mario in White Nights in 1957, they were both too mature and worldly to play a pair of innocents. Feodor Dostoevsky's 1848 story, published when he was 27, makes sense for a girl of 17 and a lonely dreamer of 26 in cold St. Petersburg in the midst of the 30-year-reign of Tsar Nicholas I. For all the visual loveliness of the film, there is no getting around the fact that a beautiful, strong-willed woman of Venice in the reign of Elvis Presley is not going to be intimidated by her blind old grandmother who pins their skirts together to protect her. Nor would she wait an entire year for a man (icily played by Jean Marais) who embraced her once and never once wrote to her after he went away. Visconti tries to tackle the implausibility of his updated script by focusing on Mario's incredulous reaction. But if Natalia is in love with a fantasy, Mario's obsession with her fantasy is an absolute fetish. In her 1986 study of Fascism in Film, Marcia Landy suggests that in Ossessione, Visconti shows that “romantic aspirations are a source of repression, not liberation,” and certainly this is true of White Nights. Locked into their romantic dreams, Natalia's and Mario's characters remain childlike and powerless in their efforts to control their destinies. Unfortunately, the results seem forced, contrived, and empty. White Nights is enhanced by Giuseppe Rotunno's beautiful camerawork, and by the sincerity of its cast, yet ultimately Visconti's emotional distance from the material limits our participation in his self-conscious fairy tale. AKA: Le Notti Bianche.

1957 107m/C IT FR Maria Schell, Jean Marais, Marcello Mastroianni, Clara Calamai, Helmut Woudenberg; D: Luchino Visconti; W: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico; C: Giuseppe Rotunno; M: Nino Rota. VHS