White Nights

This adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s tale about displaced, disconnected people drifting along crossing, doubling paths was shot in moody black-and-white on a soundstage simulacrum of Livorno, Italy. With it Luchino Visconti veered away from verisimilitude and toward an emphatically subjective style—from neorealism to neoromanticism. As a quiet man who accidentally befriends a troubled, lonely young woman (Maria Schell) and finds himself playing understudy for the absent object of her affections (Jean Marais), Marcello Mastroianni mingles subtly passionate yearnings with a characteristic note of annoyance. His character is both distrustful of and seduced by the romantic dreams that preoccupy the woman he loves.