An adaptation of the same Dostoyevski story filmed by Ivan Pyriev in the USSR in 1959, and by Robert Bresson in France in 1971 (as Four Nights of a Dreamer), White Nights is dreamlike and elegaic, using deliberately artificial settings and soft, grainy photography to gain its effects. Marcello Mastroianni plays Mario, a shy young man who meets a mysterious young girl named Natalia (played by Maria Schell), sobbing on a canal bridge. She tells him she is in love with a sailor who left on a long journey and promised to return in one year. Thus begins one of Visconti's most neglected works. White Nights is an attempt to break away from the restraints of verisimilitude, to create a mediated reality. As a consequence, this is a film in which appearance and mood totally govern the mise en scène. A stylized simulation of the streets of Livorno provides the aesthetic vacuum, a vacuum in which breathless characters are known only through their wraith-like gestures. Captured in endless night, Mario and Natalia exist in an isolation that is, oddly, both private and public. Even in the most intimate scenes, there are witnesses, motionless in the shadows, or slowly drifting by. The suspension is spectral, carried along on a subtly orchestrated mood. And enveloping each frame of White Nights is a delicate glaze of expectation belonging to both the characters and the viewer.