October 15: Le Notti Bianche (1957 -- Luchino Visconti)

★★★★

The ending of Le notti bianchi was no surprise to me since I was thinking of Brief Encounter all the way through.  The movie is a scaled-down, black-and-white love story propelled by the dynamic of two characters managing a love attraction that the man is ready to act on but that the woman has reservations about.  The woman’s reservations triumph and the man is left alone.  I saw it coming.

But that’s a glib comparison because Le notti bianche emerges naturally from Visconti’s career and because it moves to a more philosophical statement than the sad romance of Brief Encounter.  In the Lean film, we follow Laura’s perspective more than we do Dr. Harvey’s, and the sadness we feel at the end stems from our understanding of the dreary, middle class, married life that Laura is returning to.  Le notti bianche, though, follows Mario’s perspective, and his character trajectory leads to a philosophical statement rather than a personal disappointment as he goes from loneliness to hope for human contact and back to loneliness.  Mario’s struggle is an existential one, a desire not to be alone that is frustrated by a world of individual agency rather than communal.  And Mario’s philosophical voyage bears the mark of Visconti’s neorealist roots.  The world in Italian neorealism oppresses and frustrates characters who struggle against it in the same way Mario’s efforts are thwarted by the world of Le notti bianche.  Through no fault of his own, Mario’s best efforts are unable to overcome the isolated, individual situation he confronts.

It’s also not hard to find neorealist imagery within the stark artificiality of Le notti bianche.  The film’s elaborate set, though clearly artificial, includes bombed and burned out buildings that would look fine in Open City, and the film spends time in working class neighborhoods peopled by characters who work hard to transcend their circumstances.  Natalia’s aged grandmother repairs rugs and hosts lodgers to make ends meet, and the prostitute who continually solicits Mario eventually gives in to her frustration and calls out the thugs to beat him though she soon recovers her basic sense of human fairness.  She’s a neorealist figure.  And Mario’s landlady creates a whole community with her bustle and shouting as she tries to get Mario out of bed in the morning and out the door.  She’s a lower-class figure of enormous charisma.  We see even more energy in the dance sequence at the working class dance hall when the hipsters gyrate frantically to Bill Haley, eventually catching up Mario and Natalia in their energy.  Even the forlorn dog that is Mario’s only friend at the beginning and the end of the movie hearkens to films like Umberto D.  So despite the unlikely theatricality in Le notti bianche, there is more than a little neorealism.

Natalia also hearkens back to an earlier moment in Visconti’s career, Senso.  Livia, the obsessed heroine of that film, drives most of the action in that film with her monomaniacal fixation on Franz.  Her obsessive, passionate love for him compels her to ignore the duties and dangers around her as she pursues the object of her love.  Three years later, Visconti’s Natalia does the same thing in Le notti bianche.  Despite the oppressive, neorealist world of the film, Natalia dedicates herself to a man she doesn’t fully know, and she ignores everything around her, including her budding love for Mario, in fixation on a near stranger who left her a year ago, the Lodger.  One would expect that such a naïve love would only find neorealist frustration, but Le notti bianchi instead rewards her obsessiveness by reuniting her with the object of her affection.  However, the film must do this because its real focus is Mario.  The message here isn’t that obsessive love gets rewarded, because the focus of the film isn’t on Natalia.  Instead, the film shows how Natalia’s abandoning Mario leaves the main character still alone and victim to the vagaries of an arbitrary and uncaring world.  These philosophical implications prevent Le notti bianche from being mere melodrama and move it into something more profound.

Le notti bianche is a gem.  Staged and artificial, Visconti’s film still honors its neorealist roots while transforming that into portrayal of man alone in the world.  It's far more than a story of frustrated love.