Coming Soon
WHITE NIGHTS
1957
Select Showtime to Purchase Tickets
Marcello Mastroianni, as a lonely city transplant, and Maria Schell, as a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise, meet by chance on a wintery canal bridge in Venice and begin a tentative romance that quickly entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion. Luchino Visconti’s WHITE NIGHTS is an exquisite adaptation of Dostoevsky’s legendary novella, transforming this romantic, shattering tale of two restless souls into a ravishing reverie in incandescent black and white.
“Long dismissed as a footnote to Luchino Visconti’s career, this 1957 film, from the Dostoyevsky story, now seems to be a crucial turning point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films. Shot on forthrightly false sets entirely within a studio, the film brings a lonely stranger (Marcello Mastroianni, in one of his first important parts) together with a surrealistically detached woman (Maria Schell) for a brief, enigmatic affair. It’s a swooning dream vision elevated to the nearly operatic by Visconti’s rapturously stylized approach.” - Dave Kehr
“It's quite blatantly the least outwardly ambitious of Visconti's pictures, but it's easily the most tender and vulnerable; a mini-masterpiece about two hopeless romantics caught up in a web of their longing, always fearing the present. Brutal too, yet too much admiration for romanticism itself to be despairing.” - Neil Bahadur
“Long dismissed as a footnote to Luchino Visconti’s career, this 1957 film, from the Dostoyevsky story, now seems to be a crucial turning point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films. Shot on forthrightly false sets entirely within a studio, the film brings a lonely stranger (Marcello Mastroianni, in one of his first important parts) together with a surrealistically detached woman (Maria Schell) for a brief, enigmatic affair. It’s a swooning dream vision elevated to the nearly operatic by Visconti’s rapturously stylized approach.” - Dave Kehr
“It's quite blatantly the least outwardly ambitious of Visconti's pictures, but it's easily the most tender and vulnerable; a mini-masterpiece about two hopeless romantics caught up in a web of their longing, always fearing the present. Brutal too, yet too much admiration for romanticism itself to be despairing.” - Neil Bahadur