‘Duse’ Review: The Chaos of a Legend is Captured in Pietro Marcello’s Endurance Test of a Costume Drama [C-] Venice

Eleonora Duse is a name that carries the weight of legend: Te actress who revolutionized theatrical performance in Italy, who captivated audiences across Europe, and who became an icon for generations of actors, deserves a film that honors both her artistry and her contradictions. Pietro Marcello’s Duse is clearly conceived as that tribute. It focuses on her twilight years, between the devastation of the Great War and the rise of fascism, when illness, poverty, and disillusionment bore down on her, yet she returned to the stage as an act of defiance. The material is rich, urgent, and dramatic. And yet, what unfolds on screen is one of the most frustrating experiences of this festival season: a film at once bloated and hollow, straining for greatness but collapsing into its own contradictions.

The first act is, quite frankly, a test of endurance. Marcello opts for an approach that mistakes volume for intensity. Characters bellow, declaim, and hurl themselves into hysterical displays that overwhelm rather than reveal. The effect is wearying, less a serious portrait of an artist than an exercise in unintentional self-parody. The relentless shouting recalls a kitchen drama like ‘The Bear’, only transplanted into early 20th-century Italy, where every conversation feels like a crisis and every gesture is turned up to eleven. The intended solemnity curdles into absurdity, and the audience is left oscillating between discomfort and disbelief.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s performance as Duse is emblematic of the film’s contradictions. She throws herself into the role with unrestrained abandon, as if determined to embody every fragment of Duse’s inner turmoil. At times, her ferocity is arresting: a posture, a glance, the weight of her silence can convey more than any line of dialogue. In these rare moments, Bruni Tedeschi channels the fragility and grandeur of a woman who could never renounce her art, even as it consumed her. But such moments are fleeting. More often, her performance tips into excess: shrill, overwrought, exhausting. The tragedy of Duse’s final years, which should feel intimate and devastating, instead becomes deafening, almost unbearable in its constant noise. The supporting cast fares little better. Characters drift in and out, reduced to ciphers or melodramatic foils. Dialogue frequently collapses under its own weight, alternating between ponderous declarations and unintended comedy. The historical context, so crucial to understanding Duse’s plight, is sketched in only superficially. The rise of fascism looms vaguely in the background, but never with the urgency it should. Instead, we are trapped in claustrophobic rooms, watching figures shout and gesticulate as though the mere force of performance could substitute for narrative coherence.

By the final act, fatigue sets in. The endless oscillation between hysteria and solemnity leaves the viewer drained rather than moved. The figure of Eleonora Duse, who should emerge larger than life, instead feels diminished — not by her own contradictions, but by the film’s inability to handle them with nuance. It is telling that by the time the credits rolled in Sala Darsena, the audience had thinned dramatically. Later, at the press conference, the cast was met with enthusiastic applause. Both reactions seem fitting: the film inspires admiration for its ambition, but also impatience, frustration, and relief when it finally ends.

And yet, buried beneath the noise, there are glimpses of the film Duse could have been. Midway through, the shouting subsides, and Marcello briefly reins in the chaos. The camera lingers, the pace slows, and suddenly the contradictions of Duse’s life; her triumphs and failures, her independence and vulnerability, her beauty and decay are allowed to surface with clarity. For a few sequences, the film approaches the intimate portrait it promises: a meditation on an artist confronting her dissolution and using her art as her only form of resistance. These passages are powerful precisely because they are restrained. They suggest that Marcello understood the film he needed to make, but could not sustain it.

Ultimately, Duse is a contradiction without resolution. It is not the reverent homage its subject deserves, nor the daring anti-biopic Marcello seems to have envisioned, but a muddled, uneven work, at times accidentally comic, at times suffocating, at times fleetingly profound. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s performance embodies this unevenness perfectly: unbearable and magnetic, exhausting and unforgettable. It’s harsh, because the film does contain isolated passages of genuine beauty. Generous, because as a whole, Duse is less a celebration of the real life person than a demonstration of how a legend can be squandered on screen. Eleonora Duse deserved a film that could match her artistry, her contradictions, and her defiance. Instead, what remains is a wearying spectacle: noisy where it should be quiet, chaotic where it should be precise, a shadow of the greatness it set out to capture.

Grade: C-

This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival where Duse world premiered in competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.