White Nights

Directed by Ivan Pyryev, this Soviet drama adapts Dostoevsky's 1848 story of the same name. In 1840s Petersburg during the summer white nights, the Dreamer meets Nastenka on the bank of the Neva, and over five nights they walk the city telling each other their lives. Having lost faith in the lover who promised a year earlier to return and then vanished, Nastenka agrees to marry the Dreamer, who has fallen for her, and at exactly that moment the other man reappears, leaving the Dreamer alone again. Pyryev had been the best known director of Stalin era musical comedies, and during the thaw that followed Stalin's death he turned to literary adaptation and made a run of Dostoevsky films, first The Idiot, then this, and finally The Brothers Karamazov, his last. Lyudmila Marchenko, who plays Nastenka, was nineteen at the time and was called the Russian Vivien Leigh, though her career collapsed within a few years. Luchino Visconti had filmed the same story two years earlier, but Visconti moved it to contemporary Italy and shot it entirely on artificial sets built inside a studio, while Pyryev left the story in its own period and its own city. Who it's for: Anyone drawn to Dostoevsky adaptations and to Soviet cinema of the thaw. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting incident, since the film is five nights of conversation and waiting.