Pietro Marcello follows his interwar fairytale, Scarlet, by returning to the same time period for a half-literal, half-imagined portrait of legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse. There are surface comparisons to Pablo Larrian’s Maria, for Eleonora is an ailing icon in her final act – the film covers 1917 – 1923 and she died in 1924 aged 65. Yet there is little overlap between Angelina Jolie’s stagey performance and the seamless choices made here by leading lady Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
A familiar and reliable presence, usually cast in supporting roles in French films, such as Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s romcom, Anais in Love, and Catherine Corsini’s social drama, The Divide, here Tedeschi goes for broke, gliding between layers of constructed persona and raw emotion. Eleonora is usually a beatific, almost religious presence – all hushed, breathy whispers and eyes glistening with unshed tears, but sometimes something primal erupts and her voice deepens by several octaves, on one occasion literally scaring the children.
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Marcello takes his time to establish the shifting social sands of this period as amid WW1 trauma, the nation picks itself up and rallies around a plucky, can-do leader by the name of Mussolini. He resists the urge to award Eleonora foresight about how this man will be read to modern audiences. “I feel like I’m blind,” she says towards the end, and it’s true that she cannot see Mussolini – who writes off her debt – as a nascent fascist dictator. Indeed, her only functioning instincts are towards the theatre. Neither her tuberculosis nor the entreaties of her daughter (Noemie Merlant) exert the same gravitational pull as a chance to reunite with her partner in love and drama, the playwright, Gabrielle D’Annunzio (whose legacy is also closely associated with fascism).
Although she peers out with piercing blue eyes at the broken bodies of soldiers in field hospitals, Eleonora cannot connect her gifts to the present moment. Documentarian-turned-feature filmmaker, Marcello continues a motif used in Martin Eden and Scarlet by incorporating archival footage. Grainy images of military funerals and street brawls offer a scope of vision that eludes Eleonora, although the film struggles to cleanly distinguish between its directorial perspective and the more blinkered point-of-view of its protagonist.
Marcello shows the tensions surrounding an adored national treasure who, on one hand, is expected to keep on performing traditional plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare and, on the other, is critiqued for not using her stature to platform new work. The stakes of pushing boundaries at this late stage in her career are illustrated in a lively, stand out scene in which a booing audience pelt a first-time playwright with vegetables. (Guests of La Biennale can be relieved that this mode of feedback has died out.)
Working from an original script (Martin Eden and Scarlet were both adaptations) the original material does not fully merit the grave tone that persists as Eleonora wends her way through days that — in contrast with most of her countrymen — are light on peril and stakes. The film unfolds via a series of vignettes that have a tendency to go into convoluted details, labouring every beat of meandering conversations between peripheral characters.
Anachronistic touches, such as an opening shot in which World War One is rendered with toy models and a classical and electronic score by Marco Messina and Sacha Ricci, offer welcome respite from the overly portentous atmosphere. Yet keeping the film alive throughout the muted world building is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
