Forced to postpone his Genèse project (which would never be completed), two years after A Gentle Woman, Robert Bresson once again drew inspiration from a story by Dostoevsky, White Nights. Two Russian films (one for the cinema by Grigori L. Roshal and Vera P. Stroyeva in 1933 and one for the television, by Ivan Aleksandrovich Pyryev in 1959) had already been based on this melancholic story, which Dostoevsky wrote in his youth, in addition to Luchino Visconti’s 1957 adaptation, which made use of the dreamlike atmosphere of its entirely studio-based recreation of Livorno. Bresson, on the other hand, set his film in the night-time streets of modern-day Paris and made several small but significant changes to Dostoevsky’s narrative: the day-dreaming employee of the novel becomes a painter, Jacques; his meeting with the girl he will fall in love with, Marthe, is more dramatic, as she attempts suicide due to the absence of the man she loves; and Marthe/Nastenka’s grandmother is transformed into an ambiguous mother.
It is the only Bresson film photographed by Pierre Lhomme and deals with the painful impossibility of emotional fulfilment (Marthe’s happiness corresponds to Jacques unhappiness, and vice-versa) and the desire, prompted by fear, to imagine one’s life rather than to truly live it (Jacques retreats into an imaginary existence, painting and making audio recordings about the love affairs he does not experience in real life). Bresson revisits the theme of existential inadequacy and the solitude of an individual who attempts to mitigate the lack of a personal life through the creative act. The contemporary setting, which features hippies and bateau-mouche on the Seine, emphasises Jacques’ alienation from reality, but also that of Marthe, who rejects him, plunging him into an even deeper solitude.
Co-produced by Gian Vittorio Baldi, in Italy it went straight for broadcast on Rai television, in a version shorn of the sequences in which Marthe undresses in front of the mirror and of the naked girl embraced by the lodger.

Roberto Chiesi

Italian distributor: Minerva Pictures