‘Duse’ Review: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi Radiates Feverish Luminosity in Challenging Historical Character Study

Stage acting is the most ephemeral of the classical performing arts. While music can play on forever under the baton of a fresh conductor and dance can be handed down via choreographic records from one generation to the next, last night’s theatrical triumph can never be fully replicated. At least in centuries past, before the advent of filmed theater, which even now is still nothing like being there. Among the most glorious ghosts of the stage is Eleanora Duse, whose reputation as a genius has endured despite the unlikelihood that anyone still living ever saw her perform, other than in the obscure 1916 silent film, Cenere.

Director Pietro Marcello captures the gauzy quality of someone viewed through the haze of time and legend in his eccentric biographical drama Duse, as the revered Italian actress was known at the height of her fame. Played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in a tremulous performance that’s fragile, half-crazed and yet formidable — Eleanora was moody, volatile, subject to severe depression — “La Divina” is a creature conjured out of mythical remnants of a long-ago era. The approach will make it dreamily involving to some and frustrating to others, refusing to offer easy access to its self-dramatizing protagonist.

Aside from her one foray into cinema, which she felt was a poor representation of her craft, she exists only in a few photographs. She left no voice recordings, and unlike her French rival, Sarah Bernhardt (played with blazing self-importance in a brief but amusing appearance by Noémie Lvovsky), she was relatively press-shy.

That gives Bruni Tedeschi, Marcello and his co-writers Letizia Russo and Guido Silei a lot of freedom to mold this influential giant of the 19th century stage during a transitional period toward the end of her life. It’s a movie outlined in recorded history but colored in with nuances both factual and speculative, naturalistic and melodramatic.

The core of the character as represented here is that she lives through her art, and while she was widely lauded during her most active professional years, her return to the stage after World War I — prompted by financial need when she lost all her money in the Bank of Berlin collapse — is characterized as a time of uncertainty and self-doubt.

It’s a major cultural event when, more than a decade after her retirement, she forms a new stage company in Venice and plays Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady From the Sea. While Bernhardt praises her gifts, the French diva doesn’t hold back in her stinging criticism of the production, calling it the same old prewar Italian theater, out of touch with the times. That resonates sharply with Duse, who becomes desperate in her desire to embrace modernity and respond directly to the changes Italy is undergoing.

She pursues this by commissioning a new work from young playwright Giacomo Rossetti Dubois (Edoardo Sorgente), a fictional character whom she affectionately calls Giacomino. But that windy piece — drawing on Greek mythology in response to the nation’s collective grief — convinces neither the actors nor the heckling audience, who make it clear they want the classics.

Duse brutally disses Giacomino as a no-talent before going back to what she knows. Ending a period of distance with her former lover, the poet, playwright and nationalist firebrand Gabriele D’Annunzio (Fausto Russo Alesi), who says failure brought her back to him, she mounts a tour of his 1899 tragedy, The Dead City.

The company travels to Rome, where Blackshirts march in the piazzas, but Duse’s health worsens. A doctor tells her she needs a rest period, but she refuses to die in debt. She says work is all she has left, her poison and her oxygen: “It’s my cure.”

Toward the end of the film, Duse declares that the only things she wants passionately are “to live, to work, to die.” Bruni Tedeschi captures her in that vortex — her pulmonary illness confining her to bed one minute and her artistic drives reanimating her with defiant spirit the next.

That kind of contradiction is something Marcello does especially well. Duse has stately, classical qualities, but it’s also jagged, raw and modern. In that duality it resembles the director’s inventive 2019 Jack London adaptation, Martin Eden, the score for which also made effective use of electronic passages. As always, Marcello’s documentary background is evident in stirring use of seamlessly integrated archival footage depicting crowd scenes, rallies and mourners.

One of the most poignant choices is to intercut scratchy film of the train that in 1921 transported the Unknown Soldier to Rome in a coffin draped with patriotic banners and flowers, to be enshrined in the Altar of the Fatherland with an eternal flame at the Vittorio Emanuele II monument.

That hulking architectural statement — a neoclassical pile of marble with which Romans have a love-hate relationship, often referring to it as “the wedding cake” or “the typewriter” — bears witness to the many faceless, nameless fallen. But in the timeframe of Duse, it becomes more readily associated with Mussolini (Vincenzo Pirrotta), whose offer to erase her debts and give her a state pension is a trap for the politically naïve actress.

D’Annunzio jeers at her delusional belief that Il Duce will fund her dream project of a theater not for the wealthy cultural and intellectual elite, but for the Great War’s widows, orphans and veterans. He says she “got caught in the butterfly net,” but D’Annunzio is far more entangled himself.

While Duse is primarily a portrait of one mercurial artist, it also wants to be a sweeping tribute to the theater but has a perplexing scarcity of scenes that actually depict the art. Many of the movie’s best moments center not on Duse’s stage projects but on her often tense personal relationships. The thorniest of them is with her daughter Enrichetta (Noémie Merlant), still rankled by her mother’s absence during most of her childhood and strongly opposed to her coming out of retirement.

In an archly funny scene early on, Duse freaks out and has a furious Enrichetta and her children escorted out of the theater on opening night of The Lady From the Sea: “I can’t be Ellida in front of her.” But the film could have used more of the rancorous triangle formed by Enrichetta, her mother and Duse’s monastically devoted and territorial Austrian assistant, Desiree (Fanni Wrochna).

That said, Marcello’s rejection of the expositional conventions of biographical drama keeps you watching, as does the never-better Bruni Tedeschi. Outfitted by costumer Ursula Patzak in dresses notable for their unfussy simplicity but frequently hidden beneath the more regal attire of a high-collared velvet cloak and showy feathered hat, she remains a theatrical creation until her dying breath.