Visconti, "White Nights"

Many men are like Marcello Mastroianni in "White Nights" but wish they were like the Jean Marais character, because they think most women are like Maria Schell. But they are wrong. It’s very doubtful she will long be happy with this man, who not only has a dark past and other life but is stern, taciturn, commanding, authoritarian, and a lot less interesting. His job is basically to appear, disappear, and reappear, standing there. Clearly, Natalia has father issues. The Mastroianni character Mario is not a loser but a man who is unafraid to be, and so acts like himself. She would be happy with him, but is prisoner of an idea. The best scene is with the nervously excited and virtually professional black-clad male rock and roll dancer and Mario’s hilarious effort to imitate him (two variants of showing off, confident and silly), which almost makes one think of Jerry Lewis. The two men are as opposite in their appeal as image and talk, or love at first sight and an almost unwitting seduction that takes time, and in either or both of which encounters Natalia may be, as her name suggests, born or reborn. The film is “Christian” not only in that expectation but also in celebrating ordinary guys over heroes. This being Visconti, it ends sadly for Mario and for us, as Natalia sees the returned hero standing there, statuesque, and cashes in her relentlessly enchanted dream that she had been vicariously living. (Praise for that Freudian virtue, displacement, and maybe pursuit of an object of desire over its attainment).  But this beginning is an ending; for film is an art that, like love perhaps, takes its time.