by Douglas
Messerli
Luchino Visconti
(screenplay, based on a story by Fydor Dostoevsky, and director) Le Notti
Bianche (White Nights) / 1957
Let me begin this
review of Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film White Nights by doing something
I’ve never before done, recommending that you first read a piece titled “Meet
Me Tonight in Dreamland—Luchino Visconti and White Nights” written by
critic David Melville published in Senses of Cinema. In fact, I will be
sharing many of Melville’s ideas to support my own views.
Melville argues that this film, based on a
work by Fydor Dostoevsky, which Visconti transferred from the canals of St.
Petersburg to the arched bridges of the provincial Italian town of Livorno,
represents a landscape that is “slightly false” (I’d call it purposely
“theatrical”) while yet pretending to be realist. We must recall that Visconti,
a truly theatrical filmmaker by the end of his career, began as a kind of
neo-realist. But then almost all the neo-realists later turned to somewhat
exaggerated and unordinary landscapes by the end of their careers. But in White
Nights it is clear Visconti wanted to present a kind of realism that moved
closer to the world of dreams, being, in this one case, perhaps a precursor of
what later South American writers attempted to do in their works of “magic
realism,” creating landscapes that blurred reality to demonstrate the
psychological issues of their characters.
The man she loves, who has been a border in
their home, tells her, in a mysteriously-laden explanation, that he must go
away for a year to “take care of some business,” but asks her still to try to
remain available for him upon his return. Only a fool, of course, would agree
to such a proposition. But then Natalia, in her dream-like imagination, is just
such a being.
The man she meets just before her
“lover’s” return is also a strange figure, Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), a man
of the working class, who roams the night streets of this small town to
discover and share in exciting liaisons, an activity that Melville compares,
again convincingly, to gay cruising.
The night he meets Natalia, it appears he
has arrived home too late to truly hit the bars, so to speak, as lights on the
small main boulevard go out around him, shutters close, and only one bar
remains open. He wanders the rainy streets, looking for something and someone,
but, at first, only finds a hungry dog, whom he befriends. Quite by accident he
spots Natalia, and later overhears her crying on one of the small bridges that
dot this magical landscape. He is, as he later reports to her, “a shy man,”
perhaps itself a clue to his own sexuality (although Visconti is very careful
to maintain Mario’s heterosexuality in the plot). And he uses that fact as a
method to attract her; she sees him, ultimately, as friend more than a would-be
lover, which allows him to remain in her company.
Mario, as we later discover, is not quite
as innocent as he pretends. When she does reject any advances he retreats, on
another night, to the local bar frequented, it is clear, by both prostitutes
and gay boys; as Melville points out: “The most erotic moments occur, not
between the protagonists, but in a sleazy after-hours nightclub where a
black-clad, snake-hipped dancer (Dirk Sanders) cavorts to ‘Thirteen Women’, a
song by Bill Haley and His Comets.”
Yet, the honesty and obsession of Natalia
clearly intrigues him, and changes him as well, helping him to keep a distance
from her even as he falls more and more in love with her. Her request that he
help write and mail a letter to her former lover, who apparently is back in the
city, is met—at least at first—with his consent; he later, however, tears up
the letter without sending it. It is his one obvious betrayal of her; but even
then, he remains passive rather than completely admitting to his love for her.
It is only later that he admits his actions, too late it appears, since the
Marais character has returned to claim his prize.
The lonely and still-unloved Mario, at
film’s end, is left alone without anyone to truly turn to. In the very last
frames of the film, he is befriended again by the equally searching dog, and
they walk away into the night together.
Although White Nights has
seemingly remained an under-valued film even by Visconti aficionados, as
Melville argues: “With its setting of dark alleys, deserted canals and random
encounters, White Nights may well be Visconti’s ‘gayest’ film—even though it
contains no homosexual characters or situations. It is perhaps the most
evocative film ever about the gay phenomenon of ‘cruising’ and the nocturnal
city as a realm of boundless sexual fantasy.”
Clearly this is not the same world of
Visconti’s later richly color-infused, gay transgressive films such as The
Damned, Ludwig, or Death in Venice—without even the sweaty
and violent gay sexuality of Rocco and His Brothers. Nobody (except the
director in the subliminal ways I pointed to) even says anything about being
gay. The smitten prostitute is rejected by Mario. And Mastroianni, despite his
handsome face and physique, is no Alain Delon or Helmut Berger, the latter one
of Visconti’s lovers. Yet the glittering, rain-spattered streets of White
Nights portray a love quite outside the normal confines of heterosexuality.
These figures all know love as an attraction which is based on obsession and
temporality, a thing of body and time rather than tradition, family, and
commitment.
This beautiful film has a territory upon
which Visconti treads much more delicately, like its set placing it in a world
of in-between.
Los Angeles, April
3, 2018
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (April 2018).
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