Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in 'Duse.' Erika Kuenka/Venice Film Festival Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment 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. Related Stories Movies Venice Days Top Prize Awarded to Amir Azizi's 'Inside Amir' Movies '100 Nights of Hero' Review: Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe and Charli xcx Rock Cool Frocks in a Style-Over-Substance Fantasy Film 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. Duse The Bottom Line A fragmented but compelling portrait of a woman defined by her art. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Merlant, Fanni Wrochna, Fausto Russo Alesi, Edoardo Sorgente, Noémie LvovskyDirector: Pietro MarcelloScreenwriters: Letizia Russo, Guido Silei, Pietro Marcello 2 hours 3 minutes 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 i