Le notti bianche (1957, Luchino Visconti) (Patreon)

67/100

Opens with a special note of gratitude to Cinecittà, and you immediately see why: The sprawling faux-Livorno set that Visconti built, on which pretty much the entire film was shot (there are but a handful of interiors), ranks among the most gorgeously atmospheric in cinema history. It's almost distracting, frankly. Alas, it failed to completely draw my attention away from the film's one huge issue, which is that a character written by Dostoevsky as a lonely, desperate virgin afraid that he may never even get laid, much less find true love, is being played here by that noted void of testosterone Marcello Mastroianni. (Guillaume des Forêts, who plays the part in Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, is arguably likewise too hunky, but at least seems vaguely plausible as someone who's awkward around women.) Ditching the first-person narration helps, admittedly, but the story's just not as potent with Mastroianni at its center, attracting other beautiful women (points for accuracy, anyway) even as he wrestles with his passion for Natalia. That's Ed, his hilariously spastic dance in the juke joint, triggered by anxiety about how he compares to younger, hipper dudes, won me over to some degree. That entire lengthy scene astounds, actually, from Visconti's precisely chaotic staging to the use of Bill Haley and His Comets' lesser-known "Thirteen Women" (the B-side to "Rock Around the Clock," I now discover), its horny horn-driven riff the perfect soundtrack to Natalia's sudden libidinal exuberance. Gotta say I went back and forth on Schell, who herself vacillates speedily and wildly enough to make this woman, intended as merely torn between two lovers, seem potentially bipolar; she tends to overdo anything overwrought, but lights up the monochrome gloom whenever Natalia's despondence shifts to manic joy. And then Marais seems actively disgruntled to be there, which may or may not reflect an effort to make the ending unhappy on every level—I genuinely can't tell. It's possible that I think all three of the film's major roles were miscast, so the fact that my rating is nonetheless quite positive should tell you how beautifully it works in every other respect. 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Not sure why Criterion went with the original Italian for this film (commonly known as White Nights in Anglophone territories) but not for The Leopard or Death in Venice or The Damned. Seems highly arbitrary. But I have followed suit.