Venice Film Festival 2025: Review movie Duse

The life of actress Eleonora Duse (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is portrayed by director Pietro Marcello during the final stages of her career, between the end of World War I and the rise of fascism. A strong-willed woman, after a hiatus of several years, she refuses to remain distant from the theater and stages Henrik Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea with a company. Despite the triumph, it is Sarah Bernhardt who makes her understand that she must now tell something more "necessary," prompting Eleonora to focus on a piece by a young author – and soldier – Giacomino (Fausto Russo Alesi). However, the premiere is a disaster, and Eleonora abandons the young man to his disappointments.

What could have been the compelling tale of the final chapter in the Italian theater diva's life takes on overly didactic tones that fail to bring the story to life. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi infuses the character with ferocity and rare charisma, but she can do little against a frayed screenplay that focuses on inconsequential moments – such as the presence of Benito Mussolini, who decides to grant her an annuity – without leading to meaningful developments. Even Duse's return to theater with The Dead City by her lover Gabriele D'Annunzio lacks resolution: if these works were anachronistic – so much that they weren't successful even in their time, or in subsequent years – it was because audiences didn't appreciate them, relegated as they were to the poor taste of regime-approved art. In this sense, the film should have highlighted far more significant moments: the fact that she was the first woman – and Italian – to appear on the cover of the newly established Time magazine, her performance in Pittsburgh in M. Praga's The Closed Door, which led Charlie Chaplin to define her as "a suffering child (...) the perfect artist." All of this is missing from Marcello's film, which instead shows the more destitute side of the woman, such as her financial difficulties and conflicts with her daughter. 

One glimpses Duse's sense of freedom, her continuous yearning for the stage, but it's not enough to represent the actress whose face was the only photograph in Marilyn Monroe's bedroom, or for whom Meryl Streep – as she herself stated – chose this profession.