Thanks to Duse, once again the worst film in the Venetian competition risks being Italian

The life of Eleonora Duse, a legendary and “divine” figure of the Italian and European cultural scene of the early twentieth century, was a succession of triumphs and resounding professional failures. The greatest Italian theatrical actress of all time, beloved by the public and critics, had her share of personal and professional fiascos, whose memory is now almost lost, as is her voice. Of Eleonora Duse, in fact, there are some photos, an old film but no trace of her vocal quality and her theatrical art, which was ephemeral by its very nature. Nowadays, only a fading trace remains of the effect that art had on her era.

An impact that, over time, has been largely overshadowed by the long shadow of the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio and the romantic relationship between the two. An impact that Pietro Marcello's biographical film tries to recount, bringing to the big screen for the first time the contradictions, sorrows, and talents of the divine, filtered through her swan song. The Duse portrayed by Marcello is already very famous, already retired from the stage for years, already weakened by the tuberculosis that colonizes her lungs. The film follows her wandering through Italy and its theaters between 1917 and 1923, almost immediately after the war effort and at the beginning of the Fascist twenty-year period, as the actress decides to return to the stage.

Pietro Marcello suffers a resounding flop with Duse

Unfortunately, only the intentions are good: Duse is a burning fiasco, like the tragedy about Hecuba written by the protagonist's protégé and interrupted in its tour after the premiere, which ended amidst whistles, shouts, and insults. In a year in which Italian cinema at the Festival has thus surprised with the quality it has expressed in competition and in the collateral sections, Duse risks bringing home the sad record of the worst film in the competition.

It is a clear, undeniable failure, which leaves especially admirers of Pietro Marcello's cinema dismayed, as he is frankly unrecognizable here. Where has the filmmaker, measured in emotion, synthetic and effective in execution, capable of saying so much even with sparse dialogues and evocative images that we loved so much in Martin Eden, gone? It's hard to say in the face of the conventional direction of Duse, which after a promising start gradually bends to an increasingly conventional way of telling a biographical story, with only sporadic flashes of its author's visual sensibility here and there. A direction that struggles to enhance a respectable production, with the involvement of high-level professionals who worked on the basis of meticulous and palpable historical research on screen. The theatrical and everyday costumes by Ursula Patzak deserve applause, born from a careful archival study of the original sketches of Duse's wardrobe. Precisely because Duse is so refined in its settings, scenography, photography, and music, the coarseness of its narration is very surprising.

There are three screenwriters: Letizia Russo, Guido Silei, and Pietro Marcello himself. While acknowledging the difficulty of making a story from an era with very loaded, emphatic, and ornate language (i.e., D'Annunzian) natural and easily accessible to a contemporary audience, the film's script is the source of many of its problems. The conventional structure of the story makes it very predictable, and its writing struggles to convey Duse's extraordinary nature. All of this is further aggravated by a series of very emphatic and truly unfortunate lines that "don't land" well and quickly sink into the territory of kitsch.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as Eleonora Duse falls back into all her worst tics

A few months ago, I praised Valeria Bruni Tedeschi for how, in L'arte della Gioia, she managed to have great dramatic strength under the guidance of Valeria Golino, without falling into a certain emphasis that is characteristic of her. In the role of Duse, she falls back into her worst tics, condemning the film without appeal. She never stops being Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, she never becomes Eleonora Duse, instead bringing with her those reactions, that emotionality, that way of gesturing and reacting that truly destroys any pretense of suspension of disbelief, of realism. What we see is clearly a Bruni Tedeschi indulging in her worst excesses, all funny or exaggerated facial expressions, with a way of speaking so rhythmic and emphatic as to be irritating.

What's worse is that a good part of the male cast follows suit, with this unbearable tendency to load every single line with drama. The only one who truly comes out well is a simply extraordinary Noémie Merlant. In the role of Duse's daughter, Enrichetta, equally loved and neglected by her mother in a very complicated parent-child relationship, the French actress is incisive and intense without overdoing it, indeed with a very sober, almost restrained approach. Which is impressive considering that she acts in a language that is not her own, Italian, with great naturalness and perfect cadence.

In short, once again, it went much better for Gabriele d'Annunzio, who a few years ago was portrayed with exactly the same approach, with the same framework (old age, illness, increasing irrelevance on the public scene with the rise of Mussolini) in the much more convincing Il cattivo poeta by Gianluca Jodice. Marcello, on the other hand, often falls into the conventional, the rhetorical, failing to tell us what, on paper, should lead us to re-evaluate the importance, independence, and being enormously ahead of her time of his protagonist. Traits that the film completely fails to illustrate, struggling to put together the portrait of a famous woman, advanced in age and full of contradictions.