The celebrated opera singer Maria Callas is Pablo Larraín’s latest muse – or is it Angelina Jolie, the actress who portrays her? In a recent interview with the New York Times, Larraín said that despite working with Jolie for “a very long time” on the film, “I still have no idea who she is.” Being on first name terms with a person tends to imply intimacy, but in Larraín’s new film Maria, the Chilean director has no idea who his subject is either.
The singer joins Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Diana Spencer, two other glamorous, unhappy, unknowable women the director has fashioned biopics of. As with Jackie and Spencer, Maria is more comfortable inhabiting its protagonist’s sadness than it is interrogating it. The film cuts to documentary footage of the real Callas in its final moments: her radiant joy is a clue that in striving for grit, pathos and complexity, Jolie has forgotten something important.
The film, which follows the last days in Callas’ life, finds the Greek-American singer at a low ebb in Paris in 1977. She lives alone, with the exception of her maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and her devoted, aging butler Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino). Her voice is fading, she is addicted to pills, and apparently in the throes of an eating disorder (Bruna is constantly trying to get Callas to eat something other than her favourite sedative).
Callas is also in a reflective mood, which is convenient given that a documentary filmmaker (The Power of the Dog’s Kodi Smit-McPhee) has been granted an interview with her. It’s a lazy, overused trope within the biopic genre—a famous person recounts their life highlights to a journalist—but one that might be forgiven, if those vignettes help to create narrative momentum or depth. “I am rebellious by nature!” she tells Mandrax, which is both the name of the filmmaker who is following her and her drug of choice. Bizarrely, Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight choose not to illustrate that rebellious nature, instead simply taking her at her word. It’s not entirely clear whether Mandrax’s presence is supposed to be a figment of Callas’ imagination, brought on by her drug use. If it is, it seems somewhat unkind to frame Callas looking back on her career as a kind of delusion of grandeur.
Flashbacks to the obligatory scene of childhood trauma, notable performances, and her first encounter with her great love Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who left her for Jackie Kennedy, are fixed in black and white, while present day Paris is rendered in rich colour. Cinematographer Ed Lachman, who also shot the Todd Haynes films Far From Heaven and Carol, captures the exquisite fading light of a September afternoon, its bright, hopeful expanse of turquoise sky the ironic backdrop to 53-year-old Callas’ tragic, untimely demise. There’s a heightened, melodramatic grandness to the way Callas strolls through the Jardin des Tuileries and wanders the empty rooms of her lavish Paris apartment.
Jolie looks great too. The actress’ own fierce, magnetic beauty is emphasised by the immaculate period costuming, despite the oversized Seventies style spectacles she shields herself behind. The coats alone are deserving of their own aria. Jolie can be seen swaddled in a black belted leather trench with luxurious fur panels and matching leather gloves, drowning in a cream floor-length knitted dressing gown, a goddess in a coat made of red and gold brocade.
In the scenes of Callas on stage, Jolie is flawless, singing directly to the camera (she trained to perform the physicality of the songs, though she lip-syncs several of them). We see her rehearsing with an accompanist, the limitations of her now-damaged voice apparent. He encourages her to shout rather than sing, and to harness the power of her pain.
Yet the actress never quite disappears into the role. This seems at least partly the point. Jolie’s performance invites praise for her ability to dazzle as an artist who used her talents to do the same. The actress’ own celebrity image has been much dissected, and perhaps it feels more respectful to protect the “real” Callas by reverently maintaining her carefully self-fashioned image rather than scrutinizing it.
Callas’ haughty, diva-like demands are detailed with affection. She instructs Bruno to relocate the piano in her apartment, and requests to be booked into a restaurant where the waiters will greet her by name. “I’m in the mood for adulation,” she insists, a wish Larraín is all too happy to indulge.
Content from our partners
Related
