Le notti bianche (White Nights). 1957. Italy. Directed by Luchino Visconti. Screenplay by Visconti, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. With Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell, Jean Marais. In Italian; English subtitles. 4K digital restoration by Cinecittà.. 97 min.
Visconti was a frequent interpreter of both highbrow and pulp fiction, whether the work of Thomas Mann or James M. Cain. In White Nights he and his brilliant cinematographer, Giuseppe Rotunno, turned their diaphanously veiled camera on a short story by Dostoevsky—also an inspiration for Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer -about a shy young man in 19th-century St. Petersburg, here transposed to contemporary Livorno, who, lost in his thoughts and dreams, stumbles into an unrequited love for a woman caught up in her own desperate loneliness. Spellbound in wintry fog and chilly reverie, their halting nocturnal encounters along the canals, constructed entirely on a Cinecittà sound stage, are centered on a bridge spanning two irreconcilable worlds. Marcello Mastroianni, in one of his breakthrough serious roles, tragically embodies Visconti’s sense of hope against hope.