‘Duse’ review: Italian auteur Pietro Marcello’s ambitious biopic of actress Eleonora Duse

Dir: Pietro Marcello. Italy/France. 2025. 123mins

Italian auteur Pietro Marcello has at all times been within the intersection between historical past and particular person lives. His well-received and broadly distributed Martin Eden confirmed a stressed proletarian author making an attempt, and failing, to trip the bucking Twentieth-century as if it have been a rodeo bronco. Scarlet (which opened Cannes’ Administrators Fortnight in 2022), explored the affect of the Nice Conflict on a French rural village. His newest drama, which is predicated on the ultimate years of nice Italian theatre actress Eleonora Duse, makes an bold try and hyperlink the gradual demise of an previous European theatre custom with the rise of a brand new type of political theatre known as Fascism (Mussolini even options in a few scenes).

A nuanced account of a lady making an attempt to be true to her artwork

It’s an train the director and his co-writers don’t fairly handle to tug off, nevertheless it nonetheless makes for an unique, thought-provoking journey. Deeply cinematic, it is a movie for historically-minded arthouse audiences who like a problem. It could be hampered outdoors of Italy (the place the movie will likely be launched on September 18) by the truth that Duse, who was the primary lady ever to seem on the quilt of Time journal, is little remembered in the present day, besides by theatre historical past lovers, and by its claustrophobic, airless model and tone. 

Duse is former documentarian Marcello’s first movie to not be based mostly on a literary supply since his 2015 fictional debut, Misplaced and Lovely. Written with playwright Letizia Russo and story editor Guido Silei, the script is, on one degree, a portrait of a capricious artist who’s nonetheless completely dedicated to her craft, to the exclusion of family and friends. That features her emotionally needy daughter Enrichetta Marchetti (Noémie Merlant) who button-pushes the streak of cruelty working by her mom. 

By the point we meet her, in early Twentieth century, Duse is popping 60 and has not carried out on stage for a decade. She’s holed up in an ornate, stuffy Venetian palazzo, attended to by the awkward, highly-wrought Desiree (in an pleasing efficiency, rising Hungarian actress Fanni Wrochna picks up on a comic book vein effervescent below the floor, one which turns savage at instances). Monetary points pressure Eleonora again onto the stage, the place preliminary triumph is adopted by humiliation when, stung by the criticism of fellow diva Sarah Bernhardt that she’s out of contact with the instances, she insists on staging an absurd avant-garde piece by a younger protegé, Memo (Vincenzo Nemolato). 

There are apparent parallels with Pablo Larrain’s latest Callas biopic Maria, even within the casting of the central function. Like that movie’s star Angelina Jolie, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi brings a contact of her personal diva-esque high quality and popularity to what, in her palms, is a tremblingly intense but additionally nuanced and supple account of a lady making an attempt to be true to her artwork in a world she is unable to adapt to. (That’s in contrast to the nice love of her life, novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio, performed by Fausto Russo Alesi, now a world-weary cynic completely ready to be performed by the brand new regime). 

Duse is extra uncooked than Maria, and calls for extra of its viewers (together with a willingness to analysis Eleonora Duse, as verbal or typographical context is refreshingly absent). Its interval settings and costumes are lush, but additionally edgy. The drama-queen cloak Duse wears in a number of scenes has pleats of sunshine grey-brown silk inside its excessive collar that appear to be folds of tripe. Marcello makes use of excessive close-ups to dwelling in on spit, scrubbed pores and skin and dangerous enamel. Even the soundtrack is counter-programmed: stirring classical items are lower in with a recent digital rating by a trio of Italian composers that lands someplace between Vangelis and the Pet Store Boys.

A collection of colourised black-and-white sequences from Italian movie archives are spliced into the motion, however solely viewers with grasp of the nation’s inter-war historical past will know that the ceremonial prepare seen right here, greeted by enormous crowds because it makes its method by northern Italy to Rome, was bearing the coffin of the Unknown Soldier. This November 1921 tribute was arguably the final nice nationwide gesture of an older, nobler Italy earlier than Mussolini – depicted right here as a media-savvy Twentieth-century Machiavelli – ushered in a meaner small-town political mentality based mostly on bullying, resentment, lies and toxic gossip.