Grand Gestures
By Sam Bodrojan
New York Film Festival 2025:
Duse
Dir. Pietro Marcello, Italy, no distributor
One could be forgiven for assuming Pietro Marcello is a young director. His breakout, 2019’s Martin Eden, boasted so many ideas, it seemed as though Marcello felt he might never get the chance to make a feature again. The transposition of Jack London’s novel onto early 20th-century Naples is the kind of too-clever maneuver that typically denotes a debut. Its dazzling anachronistic score and luxurious cinematography were matched by an equally peacocked intellect. Marcello’s film argued furiously and confidently that art’s revolutionary potential would always be sublimated by bourgeois interests, that the idolization of any artist is the replication of fascist ideology. The film toggled breathlessly between braggadocio and overeager bluntness; it was youth personified.
But Pietro Marcello is hardly green. He has been making documentaries and hybrid features since 2004, and he’s now approaching 50. The didactic assuredness and aesthetic consistency of his work did not spring wholesale into existence. His latest, Duse, is the work of an artist with a full-fledged sensibility. It is, like Martin Eden, another terminally chic cautionary tale set in post-WWI Italy, and a definitionally “successful” motion picture. But the stagnation in its form is worrying, as much of the film is a thematic retread of Marcello’s previous work, and its attempts to push the material into something wiser and more somber are strained.
The film is a biopic of Eleonora Duse (played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) in the last years of her life. When Duse begins, the internationally famous stage actress is retired, sick, and debt-ridden. At the belittling suggestion of fellow aging starlet Sarah Bernhardt, she implores her troupe to mount a new play from Giacomo Rossetti Dubois, a former soldier, in the hopes that this may offer clarity and catharsis to Italian audiences in the wake of the Great War. Giacomo is a poor playwright, and Duse, spurred on by a selfish belief in the nobility and sway of her art, sets the play up for failure. She believes that Giacomo may be the voice of the future not because of his talent but because of his adoration for her, and because his success, by association, would solidify her legacy past her death.
The play flops, of course, and in desperation, she turns to her former lover, Gabriele D’Annunzio, now a figurehead for the country’s Fascist party, in the hopes that they may mount a new production of his play The Blind City. D’Annunzio is, like Duse, gripped by delusions of grandeur, and hopes that he might be able to hijack the movement into something positive with the beauty of his rhetoric. Duse catches the eye of Mussolini, who offers her a state-funded pension and seeks to valorize her as a symbol of Italy’s greatness. In case her fate as an oblivious figure of prelapsarian glory in the far-right cultural industry were not obvious enough, Duse resumes rehearsals against the advice of her doctor, reprising her role as Anna, a blind woman she played in her prime.
Marcello’s direction is suitably maximalist given the plot’s rather direct symbolism. The film opens on Duse, dressed all in black, alongside her daughter Désirée, suspended over the literal fog of war in a metal carriage. The movie maintains this aesthetic extravagance throughout. The music is all ominous synths, and the costumes are not outfits so much as generous heaps of fabric. There is something ineffably “fashionable” about the whole affair—a world of tragic divas and impossibly pretty portents of evils.
The movie is full of broad performances, built to play to the cheap seats. D’Annunzio is a pungent and sickly man. The cadre of theater folk spill over dining tables and walkways, expanding to fill whatever space they enter. Bruni Tedeschi is a rapturous actress, and her rendition of Duse is massive. It’s easy to take potshots at her performance as one-note or insipid or unnecessarily exaggerated. But on the contrary, I find her bigness uniquely compelling. Playing an icon who famously did not film well, and who, by the screenplay’s design, has no arc, is a tough sell. Frailty and malice would be the simplest emotions to prescribe to a figure like Duse, but Bruni Tedeschi opts for an unstoppable, pathetic hysteria. She finds wild variations on Duse’s foolishness that are, at turns, surprising, delightful, and haunting. There is a depth to her artifice.
This register pays far more dividends when the film is focused on Duse the actor rather than Duse the mother. Duse has two daughters: the silent, devoted Désirée (Fanni Wrochna), and the embittered Enrichetta, played by Noémie Merlant. Enrichetta suffers from the same psychological stasis as her mother, and Merlant cannot match Bruni Tedeschi’s seismic presence. Thus this subplot is, to uncharitably invoke another fashionable and stunted auteur, Xavier Dolan-esque: all claustrophobically cropped close-ups of free-flowing, monotonous vitriol. The two bicker and yell and relitigate lifelong wounds. This is clearly conceptualized as the emotional “core” of the film, as emphasized by the final scenes. It’s also trite and missing Marcello’s knack for beguiling spectacle. It is illuminating that a scene where Bruni Tedeschi confronts the resentments of her on-stage offspring is more striking than any verbal sparring match with Merlant.
The melodrama of Duse is nigh irresistible, a satire of artistic short-sightedness and the sublimation of culture into reactionary movements, with a gloriously iconic madwoman at its center. Yet Marcello is working with diminishing returns. Most of what the film offers finds a direct, stronger counterpart in Martin Eden, and Marcello struggles to expand his emotional palette. There is the suggestion throughout Duse that he wants to approach his signature preoccupations from a new angle. Marcello’s trademark nihilism about art’s purpose turns its eye away from young dogmatists towards the aged, the world-weary, and those who long ago compromised their values for transitory glory. At its best, Duse feels exhausted by its own “putting on the ritz” montages and its repetitive mother-daughter spats. Yet too often, Marcello cannot help himself. Whenever Duse is confronted with her encroaching demise and willful complicity in fascism, she descends into loud, tearful lamentation. It is a telling miscalculation that he seems afraid to employ a more subdued tone. Duse is the product of a thoughtful auteur in his prime. But Pietro Marcello is seduced by the superficial pleasures of his own form, to less satisfying results.