It is said that Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse, the leading lady of the Italian stage in the late 19th/early 20th century, was an intensely private, introverted woman who once told a journalist that, outside the theater “I do not exist.” One wonders, therefore, what she would have made of “Duse,” Pietro Marcello‘s worshipful, wonderstruck portrait of the artist as a no-longer-young woman, in which Duse (as she was known) played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, is a woman who very much existed — volubly, exquisitely and in extraordinary, throaty paroxysms of despair and delight — every tremulous, momentous instant of her offstage life.
Renowned in her time for her intense naturalism and her immersion in the great roles of the day (especially in the plays of Ibsen and her onetime lover Gabriel D’Annunzio, who wrote four works specifically for her) Duse enjoyed a renown only rivalled by that of her contemporary, Sarah Bernhardt, who features here in an eyecatching cameo and a showstopping wig, played by Noémie Lvovsky. Now, there may be many reasons, none of them just, why Duse’s legacy has dimmed compared to that of her Grande Dame French rival. But if Marcello is making this film out of the admirable desire to redress that ignorance, it’s a strange choice to set it after Duse’s performing heyday has already passed, after her most formative relationships have already worn down their passions, after she has already contracted the pulmonary complaint that would eventually kill her – essentially after the moment of her maximum relevancy has already had its final curtain call. How is “Duse” to restore Duse to divinity (“The Divine” was her sobriquet) if we never see her earning it, only basking in its waning glow?
Instead, writing with Letizia Russo and Guido Silei, Marcello takes Duse’s massive fame and at least some residual knowledge of her reputation as an article of faith, and picks up her story in 1917, towards the end of the First World War, some eight years after Duse has already retreated from the stage. In one of DP Marco Graziaplena’s most striking compositions, which also shows off the unerringly fabulous costume design by Ursula Patzak, Duse (Bruni Tedeschi) and her doggedly loyal assistant-companion Desirée (Fanny Wrochna) ascend on a mechanical lift to address a small encampment of Italian troops. “Long Live Italy! Long Live Duse!” they chorus after her hesitant speech is interrupted by the appearance of a circling biplane. It will not be the last time the fate of the nation is conflated with that of its apparently favorite daughter.
Speaking of favorite daughters, Duse has one, Enrichetta (Noémie Merlant), though how much she is favored over the permanently sourfaced, silent Desirée is a matter of constant angst to her. When the war ends and Duse returns to Venice to the news that her savings have all been lost to the post-war economic turmoil, her health takes a turn for the worse, and Enrichetta arrives, to assert daughterly privilege and to oust the devoted Desirée from her position at her mother’s side. But Duse unexpectedly rallies and rises from her sickbed to announce her desire to return to the stage. She re-forms her company, and arranges financing without much difficulty because everyone is so raring for her thespian return. Their Ibsen performance is an immediate success. Their following original play, written by Giacomo Rossetti Dubois (Edoardo Sorgente) a military officer and aspiring poet of dubious talent who, like almost everyone here, is in dazzled, admiring love with Duse, does not go so well.
The dialogue here is less conversation than a steady stream of proclamations and protestations about life! and art! and war! and art again! usually delivered in seriocomic epigram form. “He should not have used weapons,” says Duse sagely when asked about military strategy, “He should have used poetry! It’s slower but it lasts longer.” Occasionally, the lines feel so overripe they splat like squidgy plums left too long on the branch. And interspersed among all this overheated fiction, there is Marcello’s now-trademark use of archival documentary footage, though here it is just so much background color, and never employed in the illuminating, interrogatory way the same device was employed in Marcello’s masterpiece, “Martin Eden.” There, vintage shots intruded into the thrust of the narrative in often anachronistic, always vigorous ways. Here the scenes of the soldiers leering at the camera, the biplanes dropping pamphlets from the sky stay politely out of the way of Duse’s foregrounded theatrics.
But then, almost everyone and everything stays out the way of Bruni Tedeschi, as she eats up the screen with such relish that there’s little left for anyone else to so much as snack on. Every time she walks into a room it’s an entrance. Every encounter is a radiant reunion even if she saw whoever it was a couple of days prior. She coughs, she cries, she makes passionate statements that onscurely devastate those around her. “I shall never play in a D’Annunzio again!” She declares, theatrically which starts to mean a lot less when we realize that Duse walks theatrically, sleeps theatrically and would presumably milk a cow theatrically, were anyone to present her with an udder and a bucket.
In thrall as apparently all of Italy was to this icon of the national stage, so is Marcello to this highly exteriorized performance from his leading lady. Bruni Tedeschi seems to appear in practically every frame of the film. And when she’s not onscreen — as when the neglected Enrichetta, pinched and piqued by yet another maternal rebuff, waits with her kids outside the theater where Mamma is mounting her triumphant comeback — Marcello makes sure everyone is talking or thinking about her.
This is an exhausting way to mount a biopic, mainly because it’s hard to think of any historical personage bar possibly Jesus, who would merit such adulation, let alone an Italian theater actress who is largely unknown outside her native country and/or outside the rarefied arena of the avid historian of theater. Marcello may be intending to redress that ignorance with “Duse” but the film is so close up on her (very literally, Graziaplena’s pretty camera seems contractually obliged to linger on her Bruni Tedeschi’s face as much as possible) that it’s difficult to discern where she fits in the flow of Italian history or how her offstage, later life travails had much influence upon it.
Indeed scenes in which La Duse meets Il Duce seem bizarrely designed to emphasize just how out of touch with the world she became in her later life. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a character moved to tears by newly-installed Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (Vincenzo Pirrotta) wiping out her debts in a gesture of art-washing largesse. D’Annunzio (Fausto Russo Alesi), to his credit, later castigates her for from his own sickbed. “That phony Caesar buried you under a pittance!” he splutters. Duse’s response is to stride out of the room in a huff, a tactic she also employs later when Enrichetta dares to interrupt her dramatic bedtime reading of Pinocchio due to the fact that she’s scaring her grandkids. We are left with the impression of a woman who could be flighty and mercurial and at times, really quite petty.
It makes her one bizarre fourth wall break even odder. Threatening to not go onstage at all for her return performance because she’s heard Enrichetta is in the audience and for some reason she cannot play this role in front of her, she tells Desirée, as she wipes off her stage make-up “It’s too late!” Then she turns to us and murmurs conspiratorially, implying a chumminess we’re unlikely to be feeling, “Of course it’s not really too late.” With “Duse,” for Duse, perhaps it is.
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