White Nights movie review & film summary (1985)

The Soviet dancer is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, once of the Kirov, and the American is played by Gregory Hines, recently of "The Cotton Club." It is tempting to wonder what sort of a movie might have resulted if they had just been allowed to dance for two hours, but that, I suppose, is too much to hope for. They do find time for several remarkable dance sequences in "White Nights," and those are the major reasons to attend the movie. (The minor reasons include the luminous presence of Isabella Rossellini as Hines' wife and the superior special effects in the airplane crash scene.)

Baryshnikov opens the movie dancing opposite Florence Faure in Roland Petit's ballet "The Young Man and Death." It is an extraordinary performance, filled with athletic grace, as in one dazzling moment when he climbs onto a chair back, rides it to the floor and continues effortlessly. Hines has a no-less-amazing sequence in which he uses words and dance to explain to Baryshnikov why he chose to leave the United States and settle in the Soviet Union. The moments when the two dancers are together on the screen are the moments when the movie is alive.

All around them, alas, is a drippy thriller plot, made out of recycled political intrigue. Jerzy Skolimowski, the Polish director of "Moonlighting," plays a Soviet intelligence official who masterminds the would-be rehabilitation of Baryshnikov. As he attempts to spy and eavesdrop on the dancer's activities, the movie takes on a kind of grim monotony that's the opposite of the energy in the dances.

Incredibly, in a film filled with so much grace, the story finally comes down to an awkward action scene in which Baryshnikov, Hines and Rossellini try to slide down a rope to freedom. As nearly as I could figure out, two of them subsequently re-enter the very building they have just escaped from. Simultaneously, there is an unbelievable tactic in which the Soviet eavesdroppers are fooled by a tape recording. Give us a break.