Luchino Visconti-Le Notti bianche (1957)

Marcello Mastroianni, as a lonely city transplant, and Maria Schell, as a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise, meet by chance on a canal bridge and begin a tentative romance that quickly entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion. Luchino Viscont's Le notti bianche, an exquisite adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "White Nights," translates this romantic, shattering tale of two restless souls into a ravishing black-and-white dream. Criterion




A love triangle, the past invades the present. Mario, a shy man new in Venice, chats up a crying woman on a bridge. She's Natalia, waiting for a lover gone for a year who promised to return. For three nights, Mario accompanies Natalia, assists her, distracts her, dances with her, and falls in love. He's the present, real; can he pull Natalia into his arms, away from the past and from love for a man who will probably never return? On the third night, just before dawn, it snows. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0050782/plotsummary)




A person could probably describe the basic plot of Le Notti Bianche in a single sentence; the film is simple, and all the more timeless and beautiful for being so. It is a mood piece, a tone poem, a thoughtful study of loneliness, isolation and despair in which imagery, the placing of actors and objects within each frame, is as important to establishing character and atmosphere as dialogue and action. Le Notti Bianche works primarily on an emotional level but is also vaguely profound in its existential shadings. It exists in a world halfway between fairy tale and reality, and inhabits that world so convincingly that we never question the more fantastic elements. Cinema as poetry, pure and simple. (amazon.com)




Le Notti Bianche is different than other films in Luchino Visconti's oevre, which tend to be less visually poetic, more melodramatic. The film is certainly as operatic as other Visconti works, but in a more subtle way, how it melds music with the emotion of the moment so perfectly. It's like a Puccini opera, but without the suicide, the crying and screaming, the death by consumption. It tells a gentle story, sad, moving and totally engrossing. (amazon.com)