Pietro Marcello is dedicating his fourth fiction feature film, Duse [+lee también:
tráiler
ficha de la película] - competing in the Venice International Film Festival - to an all-time icon in the acting world. Known as “the divine” and considered to be the best theatre actress of her time (she died in April 100 years ago), Eleonora Duse is immortalised on the big screen by Marcello at the time of her return to acting after a lengthy absence from treading the boards, between 1917 and 1923.

Having always favoured documentary-fiction hybrids, the director once again relies on excerpts from real archive footage in this highly inventive work of historical contextualisation.

After a long panoramic shot of a battlefield during the opening credits, made using plastic World War I soldiers, unmoving in the fog, the film opens with Duse dressed in black and wearing a veil, visiting Italian soldiers on the front. The director immediately looks to show how the great actress’s personal crisis coincided with the social upheaval experienced in Italy and wider Europe. Later on in the film, the rise of fascism acts as a backdrop to Duse’s creative and innovative desire to bring a company of young actors to the stage with The Lady From the Sea by the much-adored Ibsen, and get another taste of success. “Art, like war, requires blood, sweat, mud, courage, discipline”, is one of the warnings she gives her actors. Crippled by debt following the collapse of the Bank of Berlin, and suffering from advanced-stage tuberculosis, the actress fights her final battle before coming to the end of her artistic and existential journey.

The best choice made in this anti-conventional biopic written by the director in league with Letizia Russo and Guido Silei, was entrusting Valeria Bruni Tedeschi with the lead role. Tedeschi conveys the diva’s disorderly sophistication (as costume designer Ursula Patzak describes it) naturally and energetically, communicating the contradictions and weaknesses of a great woman who’s reaching the end of her days. We need only observe her in scenes depicting her turbulent – to put it mildly - relationship with Gabriele D’Annunzio (an extraordinary Fausto Russo Alesi), her painful relationship with her daughter Enrichetta (Noémie Merlant), who suffers on account of a distant mother who has dedicated her life to her art, and the great tenderness she shows towards her assistant Desirée who simply adores her (a memorable Fanni Wrochna). Or in the comparison-clash with another theatre giant, Sarah Bernhardt, played by Noémie Lvovsky, who points out how everything has changed - “dreams, love” – following the catastrophe of war. Or, last but not least, in the visit she pays a brusque Benito Mussolini following his rise to power, who settles her debts and gives her an annuity (to make his “nemesis” D’Annunzio jealous).

Eleonora Duse entrusts young Giacomo Rossetti Dubois (Edoardo Sorgente) with the task of writing a modern and experimental work (“urgent and necessary”, the cult-like Duse ironically suggests) which will be brought to stage using a boorish film producer’s money and which turns out to be a disaster upon its premiere. Following this fiasco, she makes a final attempt to bring D’Annunzio’s The Dead City to stage but, ultimately, her illness overwhelms her and the time comes to accept her immortality.

Duse is an Italian-French co-production by Palomar, Avventurosa, RAI Cinema, and PiperFilm, co-produced by Ad Vitam Films and Berta Film. World sales fall to The Match Factory.