WHITE NIGHTS by Luchino Visconti
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film, Le Notti Bianche / White Nights, winner of the Silver Lion Award at that year’s Venice Film Festival, and adapted from a Fyodor Dostoevsky story of the same name, is not quite a great film — it lacks both great and new ideas. Even so, it is a very good film that uses the elaborate Hollywood-inspired sets of that era — crafted by Enzo Eusepi on a Cinecittà sound stage that is manifestly artificial — to create a very un-Hollywoodian tale of love. (Particularly un-Hollywoodian is the seemingly dour ending of its hero.)
The use of those elaborate sets immediately brought to mind Woody Allen’s 1991 film Shadows and Fog and its reliance on German Expressionistic silent films, as well as the more recent cartoon Les Triplettes de Belleville / The Triplets of Belleville. Le Notti Bianche’s dependency on those roots, likewise, adds a creepiness to the film’s superficially straightforward romantic tale.
The story is relatively simple: Scripted by Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Visconti, it takes place over several nights during an Italian winter. A poor young clerk, Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), who is new to town, meets a beautiful, young blond woman, Natalia (Maria Schell), on a small stone arched bridge. (The anonymous town seems very Venetian, though it was reputedly modeled on Livorno.)
Mario immediately falls in love with her, but she is in love with someone else, a man (Jean Marais) who left her a year ago. He was a former tenant of her grandmother’s home, where she lived. According to her, they had fallen in love but he had to leave for unexplained reasons. He promised he could come back for her in a year and she believes he will return, to continue their promised love. Mario finds her naïvete unbelievable, but listens to her tale. He is smitten, and hopes that she will turn to him when the first lover inevitably disappoints her.
What guy has not been in a similar emotional bind? So, he vows to assist her in contacting the man, whom she believes is back in town at a hotel. She dares not confront him, lest seem too demanding and presumptuous — a patently ridiculous idea for one who has waited a whole year for someone. So, she gives Mario a letter to give to the tenant, but he rips it up. He then takes her out dancing the last night before the man is due to return. He is not there at the bridge waiting for her, after Natalia is late in arriving.
She is heartbroken, feeling the fool, but Mario believes he has a chance with her. He woos her through the cold night, and, when a snowfall comes, it makes the world seem bright and new, and here is where a Hollywood film would end on a crescendo of Romantic music and a fade up to the heavens. Fortunately, Visconti was not a Hollywood hack. At daybreak, on their way home the duo see the tenant waiting on the bridge, perhaps all night long. Natalia eagerly rushes off to be with him, as Mario bids her well, his heart rent. He is left in the snow with his one night of joy, and a stray dog he saw earlier in the film. They walk off down a road to the future like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp.
The time is never specified, but the story is likely set in the mid-twentieth century, as can be attested by scattered cultural markers such as neon signs and pop music. Yet, with just the slightest change of scenery and costume the characters could be living anywhere in history.
This film, with its fairy tale like story and manifestly fake scenery and backdrops, was a stark departure from the visuals of Italian Neo-Realism that Visconti had pioneered, along with Vittorio De Sica. But, like De Sica’s famed Ladri di biciclette / The Bicycle Thief, this film does end with the ‘reality’ that most lives — and loves — endure pain (as does Mario’s). Thus, unreality and reality coexist, as Visconti claims to have sought as a goal of the film. In a sense, Le Notti Bianche is the male point of view equivalent of another Italian film released the same year, Le Notti di Cabiria / Nights of Cabiria, in which the female lead suffers love’s torments and cruel rejection.
Yet, along the way we are treated to some wonderful acting, albeit in a very restrained manner, even when Mario performs a very Chaplinesque dance routine at a rock and roll club where he takes Natalia. (The song "Thirteen Women (And Only One Man In Town)" by Bill Hailey and the Comets is playing.) Mastroianni, as always, gives a great performance. We can see that, unlike in his many other roles, this time he is playing a truly shy man. Mario displays sincerity and an unwieldy presence around women, even though he is handsome and the object of affection for other women in the film — even the local prostitute (Clara Calamai) who is obsessed with him (and who also tries to set him up for a mugging).
Maria Schell, as Natalia, has a less formally demanding role — that of the classic naive waif. Throughout much of the film her character moons wide-eyed at the camera while recalling a scene from her past. She is the classic submissive woman waiting for a knight or prince to ‘take her away from all this’ — even though her life is not that bad, for her family obviously has taken good care of her.
Jean Marais, who made his mark in the films of Jean Cocteau — especially La Belle et la bête / Beauty and the Beast — is quite good in his brief and stoic role as the unnamed (and possibly shady) tenant. Why this brooding cipher of a man becomes the object of Natalia’s affections is not explained — nor need it be, for this is the way love is. It is perfectly reasonable that his hold on her not be readily apparent. Yet, one can surmise that happens because he is older, more learned, and not too open about himself. Women fall for that sort of type all the time, though ninety-nine out of a hundred women would likely prefer Mastroianni’s empathetic and loving Mario to Marais’ distant and mysterious tenant. The best story, however, has to be that of the hundredth girl who is the exception to the rule.
The film proceeds with a dream logic; the camera dissolves by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno only accentuate this conflation of reality and unreality. Rotunno often cuts directly between present and past in one take — when Natalia first tells Mario her tale, a leftward pan becomes the prior year. Nino Rota’s score is classically Hollywoodian, but it works well because the screenplay and cinematography play against what seems to be a conventional score (especially to most American viewers, and most especially those of a half century ago).
Le Notti bianche, however, transcends the banality of contemporaneous American love tales by simplifying its story into a minimalist parable, while deepening its archetypes. Thus, the film avoids falling into all the easy clichés of the narrative form, resulting in a sort of operatic melodrama of the lost and naive.
All four of the main characters are manifestly lost: Mario in his fantasies of the perfect girl, for which he denies the advances of many females as attractive as Natalia; Natalia in her obsession with a perfect first love with a man she knows little better than Mario (if she knows the tenant at all; for why exactly has he got to leave town?); the tenant in whatever intrigues he is still hiding from Natalia; and even the prostitute, for obvious and not so obvious reasons.
Additionally, Visconti places Mario and Natalia on opposite sides of the river which flows under the bridge where they meet. She is living in the older part of town, and he lives in the modern part, replete with neon signs and gas stations. He is new to the town, a wanderer seeking stability, while she is rooted in the past, and in search of a fairy tale release. Still, despite all of her silliness and naïvete, it is Natalia’s faith and idealism that are rewarded in the film. Mario’s practicality — or pragmatic dreaming — is punished.
That seems grossly unfair because one senses something deeply sinister in her nameless, dark, and moody beloved tenant, and we do not root for his return to her. Does he work for the Mafia as a smuggler or hitman, as an Italian spy, or what? Does Maria even know his real name?
Although the film ends with Natalia seemingly triumphant, she clearly has chosen the wrong man. We know he is likely to break her heart again. We sense Mario, bereft as this portion of his life ends, will likely find another woman to fill his life as well or better than Natalia could.
The Criterion Collection Le Notti bianche DVD presents the hour-and-forty-one-minute film in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, has a twenty-minute featurette with the likes of screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico, cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno, costume designer Piero Tosi, and film critics Laura Delli Colli and Lino Miccichè. There’s an audio recording of Dostoyevsky’s short story White Nights, read by actor T. Ryder Smith, and a long, five-and-a-half-minute trailer and screen tests of Mastroianni and Schell.
There’s also an essay in the insert, "Le Notti Bianche," by film historian Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, in which he writes of the film’s realist/fantasist elements, and the symbolism of the canal bridge that separates Mario and Natalia. Lamentably, the film — lushly restored in one of the better enhancements done by The Criterion Collection — only comes with subtitles, no English language dubbed soundtrack. Given the lack of verbosity in the screenplay, this seems an unwarranted and silly exclusion from the folks at Criterion.
Le Notti bianche could have descended into trite and hyperbolic melodrama, and it is thus all the more admirable for its restraint — shown in the screenplay, the acting, directing, lighting, and other aspects. The film only gives us the bare essentials. It never overloads the viewer with information that could heighten the realism while muting the drama. There are only small moments depicted — even in the more elaborate mugging and dance scenes.
One charming scene, especially — in which we see Mario being swooned over by several young women through a glass window (one writes "Ciao" to him in the mist upon the pane) — that lets us know that Mario may be the loser on this night but he will triumph in the end.
Yes, love may be blind, and cruelly so. Mario is blinded by Natalia — the more he tries to sound practical in his dissuasions to her the more he is smitten by her Romantic fortitude. Natalia is blinded by the tenant — the more he is absent, the more she desires him. The tenant, for his part, is blinded by his mysteries — whatever they are. But Le Notti bianche is about life, and ultimately most of life is not deep. Thus, the film ends realistically in its lack of profundity. To merge two clichés into a newer one: Love stinks, but life goes on. Yet, the fact that a cliché exists does not alter it, nor make it less real a truth. It’s only how one applies the truth — or cliché — to one’s future endeavors that matters.
Le Notti bianche, both within and beyond itself, exists outside of time. Time is distorted, for we sense Mario and Natalia’s budding intimacy could not have been achieved in a mere four-day period. It’s as if the film has compressed time to heighten the drama. The viewer accepts this because Le Notti bianche never presses too strongly on other points — it never screeches loudly its posits or plaints of the cosmos.
Visconti alternately called Le Notti bianche Neo-Romantic and Neo-Intimist. In truth, it might be more accurately described as Neo-Fantasist for it is too realistic in tone to be neo-Romantic, and too archetypal to be Neo-Intimist. I generally reject such -isms, so I’ll call it simply a "damned good tale." If you need more of a marker than that to go and see it, then you are more lost and prone to fantasy than this film’s characters — and even less likely to get your reward. This verity is precisely why films like Le Notti bianche are made.
Le Notti bianche / White Nights (1957). Director: Luchino Visconti. Screenplay: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Luchino Visconti. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell, Jean Marais, Clara Calamai.
Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”
Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”
Copyright © Dan Schneider
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
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