Le Notti bianche (1957)
Directed by Luchino Visconti

Film Review

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short story White Nights was the inspiration for Le Notti bianche, one of Luchino Visconti's most hauntingly lyrical films.  A beautiful and sensitively crafted ode to caprices of love, is is unlike any other film that the director made, and a worthy recipient of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1957.  Coming between Senso (1954) and Rocco and His Brothers (1960), the film marks a significant departure from the neo-realist stylisation that had hitherto predominated in Visconti's oeuvre, towards a more dreamlike style that is partly evocative of French poetic realism of the 1930s.  This was the only one of Visconti's films to be shot entirely in the studio, on a vast and elaborate set which faithfully reproduces part of the Tuscan port of Livorno, complete with functional roads and waterways.  The central canal that splits the set in two provides a suitable metaphor for the unbridgeable gulf that separates the two main protagonists.

Visconti's decision to shoot the entire film in the studio was presumably motivated by a desire to have complete artist control over the mood of every scene in the film, something that is hard to achieve when a director works on location and is at the mercy of the elements.  Certainly, in its composition and tone, Le Notti bianche is the most harmonious and fluid of Visconti's films, the subtle changes in lighting and use of artificial mist perfectly matching the changing moods of the two principal characters, played by Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell.  Visconti could not have chosen a better pair of actors for the lead roles, as both Mastroianni and Schell have a particular talent for playing fragile characters who have that quality of appearing only slightly divorced from reality.  Jean Marais completes the love triangle à la perfection, as an ethereal presence lingering in the background, the ghost that will not go away.

Nino Rota's score and Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography both add greatly too the melancholia of the film, an aching sense of loss that is only briefly punctuated by moments of hope, such as the almost surreal sequence in which Mastroianni breaks into a star dance in a hip youth café.  The blaze of vitality that Visconti injects into this sequence comes as a visceral shock after the languorous introspection that preceded it, and the ease with which it is forgotten reminds us of the transience and fickle nature of the human passions.  As the two lovers continue to drift in their separate dreams, emotionally connected yet somehow failing to reach one another, it soon becomes apparent that they are destined never to meet in the real world.  The film ends as we expect it to, with one of the most cruel and poignant codas of any romantic drama, one that is unforgettable in its poetic simplicity.

Film Synopsis

One evening, as he wanders the streets of a town he has recently been transferred to, Mario encounters a solitary young woman named Maria.  Like Mario, Maria appears strangely disconnected from the world around her, although she has lived in the town all her life.  She is pining after a man whom she once fell in love with and who said he would return to her after a year's separation.  When they next meet, Mario is certain that he is in love with Maria, but whilst she obviously finds him attractive she clings to her erstwhile love.  When Maria's former lover fails to keep his appointment, Mario is confident that he can now persuade her to love him...