White Nights

This film is very good indeed. Visconti confirms what everybody knows: he is a master! The plot is based on a Dostoievski tale, where a love triangle is explored in the minimum psychological details. Actually, it shows the impact of a powerful passion on human behavior, it tries to explore the incredible power that love has on people's behavior, mainly when passion and irresistible attraction are present. The author tries to show that we are capable of believing anything as well as having childish attitudes when we are confronted with passion. Moreover Visconti is very elegant when dealing with all the elements, combining them with great precision.

Also it is fine to see Maria Schell and Mastroianni acting.

I watched the film many times and thought that the film has been shot at Venezia. Now I'm wathching the film again and saw some street names, like these : Scali delle pietre, Scali del Pesce etc. I began to search these names and found that the film location is not Venezia,but it is Livorno.

If you pay attention the street names or place in the film, you could find same location in Livorno. There is very little changes after 60 years.

A mythic, Venice-like city is an appropriate backdrop for a film which must have greatly offended European critics at the time who had thought of Visconti as one of the pioneers of the new realism in Italian Cinema (and indeed with Ossessione and La Terra Trema, he was!). But with this film Visconti seems to have changed his idea of what he wants in a film: instead of the pursuance of realism at all costs, we have a dream-like fairy tale about fairy tales.

Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) meets Natalia (Maria Schnell) one night, and is entranced. But as they begin to talk, over a couple of nights, he falls in love with her, and realises that she is already in love with another man. Maria is obsessed with a fairy-tale man (Jean Cocteau's leading man Jean Marais), who up and left her a year ago without explanation and said he would return in a year, and if she still loved him, he would be there for her.

This film is evocative and beautiful - i'd love to see it in a clean theatrical print - especially the snow scenes at the end.

Its a very satisfying cinema experience, and one of Visconti's most beautiful films. 8/10.

Highlights: the dancing scene! Snow scenes are beautiful, but the dancing scene stands head and shoulders above the rest of the movie. Marcello is shy and introverted - he is sitting in a night club with dreamy Natalia. When couples start getting up and busting some very cool moves to Bill Haley and the Comets' Thirteen Women, Mario becomes nervous and starts talking to her about himself, talking around the fact that he's a shy person and doesn't like dancing and physical things... he likes dreaming, solitude... But when he sees how interested Natalia is by another man pulling some mean dance moves, things change. Great scene.

In some ways, "Le Notti Bianche" is a strange film for me. On one hand, it has some of the best cinematography you'll ever see in a black & white film. The composition, the lighting, the mist--it all is so perfect. Yet, on the other hand, the story itself is so slight that I felt very unfulfilled at its conclusion.

The film begins with a lonely man wandering about the waterfront late at night. Although you'd think a guy that looks like Marcello Mastroianni would not have trouble finding a relationship, but in this film he is quite alone. By chance, he meets a very strange woman (Maria Schell). She is VERY shy--and behaves a bit oddly. However, despite this, he vows to stop by the same place they met and see her, if she wants, the following night. From this very inauspicious beginning, two lonely people meet and form a friendship....and perhaps more. Eventually, you understand some of her weird behaviors--she's actually waiting for another man (Jean Marais)--a man who you assume will never come.

There really is NOT a lot more to the film than my description. It isn't a bad film but I wanted more. I liked Mastroianni's character (though he was a sad fellow) but found Schell's perplexing and hard to believe. I also thought their relationship a bit hard to believe as well--going from total strangers to talking about marriage WAY too fast. In fact, the story itself was only okay--but the film earns a 7 simply for its look. Not a particularly enjoyable or engaging film for me--and it receives a very, very mild recommendation from me.

"The white nights" is a very fragile exquisite tale based on story of Dostoievsky. With the images extremely beautiful it tells the story of an ordinary young man Mario, who met an unusual, like from another century girl, fell in love with her and almost made her fall in love too and then lost her forever. Here two different worlds collide unambiguously - the modern, cold, indifferent stylized world and the old, more intimate and hearty one, and this collision makes many ironical and sad situations. Mastroiani plays one of his best role and looks like a real melancholic looser, Shell is eccentric, touching and gentle with her little hat and ridiculous gorgette ( dresses made by Piero Tosi seems to be the another participants of performance, so nice and expressive they are). Marais seems imperturbable like always and looks very mysteriously, a kind of fatal personage, incarnation of doom. In general film is very nice, gently and by the end tear-wringing (that's not bad indeed) and Visconti with his talent of turning usual realistic details into symbolic made this story even more beautiful then in a book.