Le notti bianche

Another movie I watched over the Thanksgiving weekend was Le notti bianche (White Nights), which is available on DVD courtesy of the Criterion collection.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Mario, who lives in a northern Italian city that has a canal, although the movie doesn't say that it's set in Venice. He gets home from a day out late one evening, and finds a woman standing on a bridge waiting. When some guys harass her, he steps in. He finds that the woman is named Natalia (Maria Schell), and she lives not too far away. Mario clearly is interested in Natalia, but the feeling may not be mutual.

Natalia has a sort of sob story to tell. She lives with her elderly and nearly blind grandmother. The family used to be wealthier, and her parents sold fine carpets. But her parents died, and all the family can aford to do now is repair carpets. They even have to take in a boarder in the spare room to make ends meet. Natalia fell in love with the previous boarder (Jean Marais), but she also knew her grandmother wouldn't permit a relationship. Still, just when she's getting up the courage to tell the boarder her feelings, he offers to take the family to the opera.

He has a reason for doing it, in that he has to leave town for a year for unstated reasons, and this is his gift to them. But he promises to see Natalia again. That year has passed, and Natalia is on the bridge every night waiting for the former boarder to show up. Obviously he hasn't shown up so far or Natalia wouldn't still have been at the bridge pining for her lost love.

Mario understandably reasons that the boarder either forgot or was otherwise unable to show up, so he starts putting the moves on Natalia. And then, just as it looks like he might be about to get somewhere, Natalia claims she's heard about the boarder's return and his address in town. The logical course of action is for her to go visit him, but for some reason she insists on writing and lets Mario hand deliver the letter, which frankly makes no sense

Will Natalia ever meet the boarder again? If Mario has his way, he'll convince her that he's the right guy for her and that she should love him, but you get the impression that no matter what anybody else does, Natalia is always going to love that boarder....

Le notti bianche is one of those movies that a certain type of film fan is going to love and praise to high heaven, as you can see by the reviews on IMDb. That having been said, it's also the kind of movie that tends to appeal less to me. I found myself thinking that both characters come across as a bit selfish, and shaking my head at the plot holes. It's not that the movie is bad by any means; there's a lot of nice cinematography. It's just that I fould myself having trouble caring about these characters.

Le notti bianche is not to be confused with the 1980s Hollywood movie called White Nights: