Dance Movies

White Nights is a 1985 film starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines, Jerzy Skolimowski, Helen Mirren and Isabella Rossellini. Directed by Taylor Hackford, it was shot in Finland.

The film is notable both for the dancing of Hines and Baryshnikov and for the Academy Award winning song “Say You, Say Me” by Lionel Richie, as well as “Separate Lives” performed by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin and written by Stephen Bishop.

Taylor Hackford met his future wife, Oscar Award-winning actress Helen Mirren, during the filming of White Nights. As a young woman, Mirren had vowed never to marry, but after 12 years together she and Hackford tied the knot on December 31, 1997 at Ardersier Parish Church near Inverness, Scotland.

Plot

Hines plays an American tap dancer, Raymond Greenwood, who has defected to the Soviet Union. He encounters and befriends Nikolai ‘Kolya’ Rodchenko, a Soviet ballet dancer played by Baryshnikov, who had previously defected in the other direction. Isabella Rossellini plays Darya, Greenwood’s wife, and Helen Mirren plays Galina Ivanova, a former ballerina who never left the Soviet Union and is an old flame of Rodchenko.

Greenwood and Rodchenko perform a cinematic pas de deux after a plane carrying the latter makes a forced landing in Siberia and he is recognized. Both dancers are brought to Leningrad where the Soviets seek to exploit Rodchenko’s talent. After an initial period of racial and artistic friction, the two dancers (and defectors in opposite directions) become strong friends and Greenwood helps arrange an escape. Rodchenko’s second defection, at the end of the film, presages the later fall of the Soviet Union in similar vein to Rocky IV.