White Nights
WHITE NIGHTS (15)
D: Taylor Hackford
Columbia/New Visions/Delphi (Taylor Hackford & William
S. Gilmore)
US 1985
135 mins
Drama/Thriller
W: James Goldman & Eric Hughes
DP: David Watkin
Ed: Fredric Steinkamp & William Steinkamp
Mus: Michel Colombier
Mikhail Baryshnikov (Nikolai Rodchenko),
Gregory Hines (Raymond Greenwood), Isabella Rossellini (Darya Greenwood), Jerry Skolimowski (Col. Chaiko), Helen Mirren (Galina Ivanova)
Director Taylor Hackford and co-writers James Goldman
& Eric Hughes had a near impossible job of moulding something entertaining with, what is essentially, a film about ballet, and do so by merging it with the thriller genre and making it an
escape movie with interludes of dance scenes. A novel piece of filmmaking to say the very least.
Mikhail Baryshnikov plays an émigré ballet star whose
plane must make an emergency landing in the (former) Soviet Union. He finds himself prisoner in Leningrad, where a black tap dancer and his Russian wife are forced to hold him captive so he
can be unveiled in a political propaganda play.
There's many things about White Nights which don't quite
work, and the Cold War angle hasn't dated well, but the performances of Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines comes across particularly well, even though the film is merely a series of MTV-style
music videos.
6/10
