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NYFF 2025: Duse, Gavagai
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Fanni Wrochna in Duse When I caught up with Martin Eden during the pandemic, I liked it pretty well but didn’t understand “what, exactly, is the value of […] a eulogy for the Western European project’s dissolution at this late date.” Whoops! I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp why Pietro Marcello wanted to delve into fascism’s allure for charismatic upstarts in 2019; I certainly get it now, so perhaps my positive response to his tepidly-received Duse is, in part, a delayed apology for spacing the first time round. This film’s project is, pretty precisely, gender-flipped Martin Eden (more succinctly, per my colleague Mark Asch, Martina Eden); instead of chronologically and geographically transplanting a Jack London character, this time raw thematic material is provided by the real-life actress Eleanora Duse. Where Martin Eden gave Luca Marinelli a profile-boosting breakthrough role (to the extent that he’s now literally playing Mussolini in a Joe Wright miniseries, which I guess is a logical if borderline self-parodic companion part—no more subtext!), here the lead is the mega-established Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, a big star playing a big star and hence given full permission to give an all-out performance often pitched at either a whisper or a bellow, with nothing in the middle.
Tracing Duse’s path from the tail end of WWI through the early ‘30s as bankruptcy forces the long-retired performer back into action, the film’s relationship to historical specifics is very fast-and-loose. That’s kind of ironic for a film that’s about capital-H History and how very specific politics are unignorable objects for rigorous study, ideas which the dialogue regularly makes explicit (“Not even Gabriele D’Annunzio can change the tide of history”). Grimacing, crying and generally mugging her way through every single scene, at first Tedeschi was pissing me off through her excess of hyper-scaled, unmissable Acting, the kind whose awards-season clip-worthy potential you can almost see being timed out in the edit room. (I lost track of the number of times she’s referred to as “the Divine.”) But pretty much everyone here is on the same tonal page, setting a histrionic level I came to enjoy being buffeted by; my favorite is the theater director who, disgusted that his leading lady wants to pivot from staging Ibsen to an unknown Futurist newcomer, spits out “Sir! William! Shakespeare!” (exclamation points not mine but the subtitles’) and storms off. Eternal verities or nothing!
Setting aside the considerable entertainment value I got from watching this all-star hamfest take place against gorgeous Venetian backdrops or inside that city’s beautiful Teatro La Fenice opera house, Duse hit because of its core tenet: History is a real thing that actually exists. This is anathema to (sorry, but it’s inevitable) the Trumpian conviction that History consists, at most, of a series of personal grudges given superficial context by dog-eared John Birch Society pamphlets passed down from the ’50s, and that the past’s only real use is to provide grist for the AI mills.1 If Marcello’s impulses are in part urgent because they’re didactic, they lead him to places nearly as strange as the ones Roberto Rossellini reached in his historical TV movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Motivated by fears that Italy was moving in the wrong direction, Rossellini concluded that his responsibility was to restage history in scenes of endless dialogue, recited completely uninflected and often scored by the ominous early sampler experiments of Mario Nascimbene for an extra-anachronistic touch. Marcello’s visual and performative approach is different, and the peppy light-electronica score (from Marcello’s longtime composers Marco Messina and Sacha Ricci, this time joined by Fabrizio Elvetico), like Martin Eden’s, makes for surprisingly rollicking listening; his other signatures include regularly splicing in apposite hand-tinted archival material, texturally meaningfully different from the mostly 16mm-capture he and DP Marco Graziaplena gravitate to otherwise. Further cementing the idea of a self-consciously interlocking Marcello Cinematic Universe, in an interview Graziaplena notes that Marcello repurposed an excerpt from one of his own past films as the view through a train window’s vantage.
The sole world premiere in NYFF’s main slate, Ulrich Köhler’s Gavagai is yet another contribution to the movie-about-making-a-movie genre—which, granted, has been with us since the beginning of the medium, but whose numbers are really proliferating out of control in recent years; this is the third example I’ve seen this fall. Why all this increasing activity? As a formalist, I believe cinema’s primary task is the creation of images, and for that purpose any starting point is as valid as any other; as a person who aspires to be well-rounded and have a life outside the cinema, I wish we could knock it off a little. A cynical explanation might be that it helps save money if all your set dressing is C-stands you have to have there anyway; a more reasonable one is that as those budgets decrease, it’s harder to focus on anything outside the grind of making a movie. In any case, Köhler’s best moments have little to do with this starting premise, which essentially amounts to a single opening on-set scene on the shoot day from hell.
The opening on-set setpiece matters more because it offers numerous instances of potential racisms and social hierarchies; the tone is less satirical and more illustrative in depicting numerous racialized faultiness and situations where the optics are bad no matter what decision you make. That the sequence is in part about a French female director who every single programmer has heavily implied or outright said is based on Claire Denis (a white French woman shooting in Africa) is essentially irrelevant, not least because the director character recedes for much of the rest of the film. The real star is arguably the amazing Maren Eggert as her lead actress, who walks through a trilingual role here like it’s nothing. (Eggert is also the star of a number of Angela Schanelec films, sort of the Josh O’Conner of making that severe auteur’s work more financeable, and I appreciate her for that as well.) Köhler doesn’t have much interest in roasting either his characters or “subverting” the presumed blind spots of imaginary viewers; the movie is funny but certainly nothing as simplistic as shaking a fist at woke kids these days, and its best scene involves a character trying to figure out if his ass is about to be kicked immediately or if someone’s merely messing with him, an exquisitely calibrated and unresolved tension. Köhler’s a sneaky filmmaker, using conventional visual language and fully fleshed-out plotting to wrongfoot expectations in ways you couldn’t see coming, and it’s a pleasure to have him back for his first film in six years (!). Come back sooner next time please.
1 Though I have to note that the end credits both inform that part of the sound work was done using AI, followed immediately by an explicit statement that the film can’t be used to train AI systems. Seems…unresolved. ↩
