A Film Canon

Centring on a sustained testimony and the composition of a crucial letter, Dostoyevsky's iconic novella makes for an unusual translation into cinematic language, as Visconti uses it both as a convenient transition between his earlier, testimonial neorealism, and the aristocratic, melodramatic formalism of his subsequent works, and, more strikingly, as the pretext for elaborating a nexus between speech and sight - the word 'ciao' traced on a foggy window - that corresponds to the characters' persistent effort to inhabit a nexus between public and private space, insofar as publicity is equated with the panoptic, mobile, camera that opens the narrative, and privacy with the written and verbal exchanges around which its two confidences emerge - between a woman (Maria Schell) and man (Jean Marais) that agree to renew their love in a year's time, and between the same woman and the man (Marcello Mastroianni) that she meets after that period has elapsed, and to whom she confesses all her doubts and fears. To this end, Visconti simultaneously compresses and distends space, suffusing the evocative streetscapes with an inky blackness that flattens everything outside of the lover's faces, and expanding even the most shallow interior spaces (most poetically a series of shop displays), until the most panoramic vantage point is gained by gazing in at the lovers through a foggy window - at least in realistic terms, since the correspondence between this impossible spatial requirement and the anamorphic world of fairy tales is explicated in the final sequence, in which the couple's desire to remain just at the cusp of visibility is satisfied by a windy oscillation between light and darkness that settles, gradually, into an exquisite median of shadow and, finally, a fall of snow that carpets the city with a hush that both brightens and renders it irreducibly private; a child's fantasy of a white night, that ceaseless wandering can have a destination.