This article appeared in the October 10, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Duse (Pietro Marcello, 2025)
Eleonora Duse was the first actor—and the first Italian—to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. The occasion, for the July 30, 1923 edition, was an American comeback tour by the 64-year-old stage actress who was widely considered one of the world’s finest performers. Charlie Chaplin called her “the greatest artist I have ever seen,” and playwright George Bernard Shaw famously preferred her to longtime rival Sarah Bernhardt. A New York Times appreciation after her death in 1924 said that “the major part of Duse’s art lay in a thing which no one could definitely see or adequately describe—the thing for which we have only the poor, hackneyed word ‘spirit.’” The writer went on to suggest that “perhaps the secret of Duse’s power lay in her eyes, which, always luminous, seemed always blind to the outward world, taking their light from within.”
Duse’s approach, more internal and naturalistic than her contemporaries, inspired Actors Studio director Lee Strasberg, and her fans included Anna Magnani and Marilyn Monroe, even though they could only read and hear about her work secondhand. Her acting seems tailor-made for cinema, but she remained devoted to theater and appeared in just one movie, the 1917 film Cenere (“Ashes”), which, though she dismissed it, offers glimpses of her controlled intensity.
Eschewing the rise-and-fall tropes of the standard biopic, Pietro Marcello’s lustrous Duse is bathed in the fading glamour of an Italy ravaged by the First World War. Instead of focusing on the actress’s many triumphs, Marcello hones in on the struggles and frequent failures of her later years. With the contrapuntal blend of exquisite beauty and raw, documentary-style immediacy that characterizes his films—including Lost and Beautiful (2015), Martin Eden (2019), and Scarlet (2022)—Duse is magnificently anchored by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s radiant, seemingly possessed performance as Duse: a woman of the stage even in her most private moments, her every gesture speaking volumes. Tedeschi’s expressive eyes suggest Duse’s turbulent inner life, as she tries to find a place for herself and her art in a world in which fascism is on the rise.
Refusing to be bound by marriage (her union with actor Tebaldo Checchi did not last long, and she had a turbulent relationship with the playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio) or the demands of motherhood (she sent her daughter away to boarding school), Duse was an artist and a rebel, making her a fitting subject for Marcello. I talked to him just after the film’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives an extraordinary performance as Eleonora Duse. What was it like collaborating with her?
I can say that I did this movie in a state of grace. Valeria is a great actress but also a great director, and that contributed a lot. Both of us love improvisation. I come from documentary, so for me improvisation is a vital force. I operated the camera for many of the scenes.
The way you film Valeria does feel like cinema verité. You catch her reactions, and a lot of what is important in the film is in the difference between what she’s saying and what she’s really feeling.
The handheld camera was a counterpoint. It was important for there to be contrast—not to have the film feel too classical, or like a standard biopic. It would have been difficult for me to make that kind of film! And it was important for me to have a direct relationship with her, so that’s why I needed to operate the camera directly, and move around quickly.
In terms of crafting the performance, was it a challenge that there is almost no existing archival footage of Duse?
There was a recording by Edison, but that was lost. There were letters between her and her daughter Enrichetta [played here by Noémie Merlant]. Enrichetta was very religious, and her sons became priests. As for Valeria creating Eleonora, for me it was about finding her spirit. I wasn’t interested in the rise to fame; I was interested in the last few years when she was vulnerable and fragile, and also there was the dissolution of the country. That’s the situation that I wanted to depict.
In movies, people always want to see victories, but I wasn’t interested in that. I was much more interested in the failures. I’m very interested in the losers in history. The story of Duse shows how she was a revolutionary in theater, she was a real innovator. And many of her productions were not accepted by the public.
Early in the film, Eleonora wants to hold on to tradition, performing Ibsen and other staples of classic drama, and she resists the pull of modernity. But then there is a key encounter with Sarah Bernhardt, who accuses her of not keeping up with the new reality of the world after the war. That encounter shakes her to her core, and she then decides that she needs a wholly different approach.
There’s a human fragility that is innate in everyone, which is what I wanted to depict. Duse was modern, even in the beginning, but Italian theater was not. Sarah Bernhardt gave her that criticism. And that’s why she fell into the hands of this aspiring modern playwright, Giacomo Rossetti Dubois, who is not actually very good. But Eleonora wanted to be modern. She gave Giacomo a chance because she was trying to innovate. Sometimes artists create false myths. They believe in someone who turns out not to be so great. She thought that because he was young, he must be the future, he must be modern, but that wasn’t the case. And I wanted to show the delusion that she experienced by believing in this man who did not deserve her trust.
And what about the crisis in confidence she had after that meeting with Sarah Bernhardt?
She stopped acting, for many years. But when she needed the money, she went back to acting.
That’s an important theme in this film—what people do for money and for political accommodation. Eleonora is tempted to give in to Mussolini and accept his sponsorship, in order to support herself and her family.
When she went to meet with Mussolini, her objective was to raise money to build an innovative theater, but that wasn’t his intention. He wanted to own and possess her, because she was a great talent. Because she was fragile at that time, she almost fell prey to Mussolini and the rising fascism in Italy.
She was being neglected at this point in her career, because of her ties to the past. She became disillusioned. It was a decadent time, and everything was decomposing. There’s a parallel journey between her and the soldiers who had fallen in the war. The mothers had to cry for the men they lost.
We have a lot of monuments from after the First World War, dedicated to soldiers that died anonymously. Those statues were created to oppose the generals who created the war. But Mussolini wanted to own those as well. So the fascists turned these monuments to peace into pro-war symbols, in Africa and other colonies.
That’s happening now in the United States; the Department of Defense has become the Department of War. Everything is being turned around. The archival footage of the crowds greeting the trains carrying the unknown soldiers—was that originally in color?
No. It’s footage that was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna. I added the three layers of color, like an early Technicolor film. I’m an archivist; I love to work with archival footage. It is more powerful than fiction—it’s above fiction.
What has it been like making the switch from your early documentary work to these ambitious period films?
Duse has much in common with Martin Eden. I’m fascinated by people in revolt. The rebels. It’s the same story; Duse was a rebel for her time. She lived in a male-dominated world and at that time women were mostly in passive roles, and thanks to her things changed. Her talent was above the norm; it was larger than life. It was like a bomb, something monstrous.
The look of your film and the story, about a theater troupe in the period between the wars, made me think of the Soviet movie A Slave of Love (1976), by Nikita Mikhalkov.
That’s very interesting. Of course Eleonora was a woman of theater, and, as Robert Bresson said, cinema and theater are always in conflict. Slave of Love is a film; it’s not theater. When you make a movie about theater, you’re still making a film. That creates a tension between the two art forms. Cinema became the modern art form. Theater is an older form, and that tension is very important to the film. Cinema can take characters from theater and put them in film. But you cannot have both.
Well, good movies are different from theater.
I try to do what I can [laughs]. It’s complicated for me because of my judgment of myself.
How did you create the theater pieces? The staging of the productions?
I always use the pacing of cinema; it was never pure theater. This is a lesson I learned from the great masters of cinema. You should never bring theater into film and make them cohabitate. It’s always about maintaining the timing of cinema. Like The Golden Coach (1952) by Renoir, and Children of Paradise (1945) [by Carné], it’s cinema by way of theater.
What did playing the role do for Valeria? If you’re playing an actress, you must be thinking about your own work.
She had a fully fledged conversion. She changed a lot. This is a movie that changed her profoundly, especially because her approach was moral. She entered this character in a moral way. She had to bring a lot of herself to the role, as well as the character. She used to talk to Eleonora; she had a direct spiritual connection to her. It was very powerful and overwhelming. It was amazing to watch.
Her flow was uninterrupted. I let it go for 10 minutes at a time. I wanted this flow to go on and on. It was important for her to act without stopping the camera. I was possessed by Valeria, Valeria was possessed by Eleonora, and we had this powerful connection.
David Schwartz is an independent programmer and writer. He is curator at large at Museum of the Moving Image, where he was Chief Curator of Film for 28 years, and he recently programmed the series “A Theater Near You” for the Museum of Modern Art and “Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema” for Film Forum.
Source link
