Who would have guessed that an Italian film made in 1957, starring one icon of that nation’s cinema (Marcello Mastroianni) and directed by another (Luchino Visconti), and based, of all things, on a short story by a long-dead Russian master (Fyodor Dostoevsky), would speak more urgently to contemporary audiences’ needs, fears, and hopes than any other release this summer?
White Nights was first seen in cinemas nearly 70 years ago, but fate has conspired for its recent revival to come at a time when it could not be more relevant. Janus Films’s rerelease of a sterling restoration of the film is playing at New York’s Film Forum through Aug. 6. The restoration will then begin to make its rounds across the country, with scheduled stops including the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, both starting Aug. 7.
On the one hand, White Nights resembles a museum piece, a reminder of a form of cinema — extravagant, expressive, moonily romantic — that no longer exists and as practiced by artists whose very names suggest an earlier era: The cinematographer, working in black-and-white, is Giuseppe Rottuno and the composer is Nino Rota, both best known for their associations with another past master, Federico Fellini. Born in 1906, Visconti was older than either collaborator, and his high-toned, overripe style, expressed in his masterpieces Senso (1954) and The Leopard (1963), arguably renders him an even more remote figure.
On the other hand, this movie concerns a condition afflicting untold numbers of people in America today, especially those hovering just under or just over 40: Having deferred marriage and family life, for reasons personal, practical, and societal, these people find themselves exiles from adulthood — lonesome, solitary, yearning for the companionship of a spouse and the responsibility of raising children that seemingly came so readily to their parents. The story, to put it in crass contemporary terms that nonetheless feel right, can be seen as a study in a “failure to launch.” That the film puts across this theme in an intensely romantic style, far from diminishing or trivializing contemporary viewers’ woes, gives a kind of validation to them — an assurance that this state of affairs, which can seem so unique to the 21st century and our era’s disordered notions of male-female relationships, was anticipated by a great Russian writer and a major Italian filmmaker.
One of the reasons the film feels so urgent is that Visconti, adapting Dostoevsky’s story with Suso Cecchi d’Amico, deposited the characters from 19th-century Russia into 1950s Italy. It is impossible for modern audiences to know how this radical change was perceived at the time, but for us, it yokes the story ever more closely to reality. The opening shots instantly tell us we are somewhere recognizably modern: Mario (Mastroianni) is seen traversing the dark, emptied-out streets of an Italian city (whose intimate, even miniaturized-looking dimensions reveal it to have been summoned into existence on a Cinecitta studio stage) illuminated not by the moon but by garish neon signs, including one for an Esso gas station.
Having recently arrived in the city to start a new job, Mario prowls around the nearly vacant urban landscape, seemingly looking for someone to talk to but finding only a stray dog. He puffs a cigarette and looks upward, hopefully, but finds only shutters being closed for the night. His isolation is not that of a man locked up in a room but a man who delays going into that room for as long as possible. We learn that Mario, earlier the same day, had accompanied his employer and his employer’s family for an outing in the country, but to be among a close-knit group and not be part of that close-knit group is its own sort of sadness.
Miraculously, it first seems to us, Mario allows his eyes to drift to Natalia (the celestial Maria Schell), who, tearful and standing perhaps too close for comfort at the edge of a bridge, appears as companionless as our hero. Having proved his gallantry by shielding her from a pair of motorcycle-riding hooligans, he persuades her to let him accompany her to her home, which she shares, in a state of poverty, with her grandmother. Can a man who lives alone and a woman who lives with her grandmother be so different?
In fact, Mario and Natalia have each entered adulthood without its benefits: she is tethered to what remains of her family — literally so, since her grandmother, in a detail straight from Dostoevsky, has insisted on keeping her close by pinning her skirt to her own — and he is accustomed to solitude following a life of forever adapting to new places. Yet Natalia has hope for relief from her condition: as we learn in flashbacks that are elegantly folded into the present-day scenes, Natalia has become bewitched by a former tenant (Jean Marais), who, though he has been absent from the scene for a year, pledges the resumption of their romance upon his return.
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Rota’s gorgeous score swells sweetly as this affair is sketched, but Mario — older and wiser, to quote the Rodgers and Hammerstein song — has his doubts about a man who seems to him like a cad. Besides, Mario is certain that what ails Natalia can be cured by him; against all odds, he reckons, two forlorn creatures have found each other. Yet Natalia is more insistent than we might imagine about the validity of her relationship with the tenant. Though we fear she has transformed a first crush into something like a spiritual devotion, we see how dreamily Schell smiles at the tenant; the smile she offers Mario is, by comparison, demure and guarded. Schell, whose wide eyes often glisten, is a vision, while Mastroianni, so far from the poised, self-assured types he played in his more famous films, is believably young and easily wounded.
“The first time we met, you didn’t think you’d end up playing my older brother,” Natalia tells Mario after enlisting him to help dispatch a love letter to the tenant. And despite Mario’s best efforts to control the situation, White Nights will end in disappointment for one of its central characters. But no audience in 2026 can fail to connect with the eagerness with which they each embrace a chance they had seemingly given up on — to slough off the obligations or trepidations that had kept each unmarried. This is no museum piece at all — see this truly great film to be reminded of our lives today.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.