Continued Spencer and Jackie — a biographical melodrama about Princess Diana and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy — Chilean director Pablo Larraín concludes his unofficial trilogy with Mariais another film about a world-famous woman’s close encounter with death, this time the Greek-American opera singer Maria Callas. The film doesn’t come together as neatly (or perfectly) as its predecessor, but its most powerful scenes far surpass its predecessor, thanks to a commanding, transcendent performance from star Angelina Jolie.
Maria The film is set in the final week of Callas’ life, a time when she lived a solitary life far from the spotlight. Spencer Screenwriter Steven Knight imagined these momentous days, but the resulting film is, sadly, less than the sum of its parts. But each of those elements is so good that it not only produces incredibly moving material, but also provides Jolie with the foundation to craft perhaps the most complex performance of her illustrious career.
what Maria About?
Set in 1977, Maria The film begins with Callas’ body being discovered in his Paris penthouse on the day he dies of a sudden heart attack, a scene shot from a distinctly ghostly perspective: Larraín’s handheld camera peers into the scene from an adjacent room, lending it a ghostly presence that frames the rest of the film, set the previous week, as if it were a desperate letter sent by Callas from the afterlife.
Putting words into the mouth of a dead person is a dangerous business, especially since so little is known about her later years. Spencer and JackieLarraín’s focus is on the intersection of private and public life, so his biopics are inherently speculative. His final film, the satirical El CondeReinterpreting Augusto Pinochet as a vampire Maria It certainly doesn’t go quite that far (Larraín understandably has more respect for Callas than for the Chilean dictator), but it exists along similar lines as a stylized examination of 20th-century history.
In the week before her death, Callas had been struggling to regain her voice, which hadn’t been at full power for some time. But her retreat from public life had led her to self-medicate with a cocktail of barely regulated drugs, an effect the film reveals early on: Callas insists that her hardworking butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), who become her key confidants in the film, that she has an upcoming television interview with Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a journalist with the same name as the sedative. When Mandrax arrives, he’s not in the same room (or in the same shot) as anyone but Callas.
Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”
Credit: Netflix
That Mandrax is a hallucination is hardly a surprise; in fact, Callas is very aware of her growing increasingly detached from reality, which almost seems intended as a plot twist in earlier drafts. It takes several scenes before Callas’ interview with the ghost reporter produces some worthwhile material — personal revelations about Callas’ past and ruminations on her fame — which gradually begin to change the film’s tone and look.
Maria It tells a story through shifting textures and timelines.
Hollywood biopics, especially Often parodied The musical variety tends to follow a standard structure, beginning with the actor on the brink of a key late-career performance before the film unfolds in flashback. Maria bucks this trend with a unique narrative purpose, condensing Callas’ life into brief memory fragments while stretching out the aforementioned moments of his later years across the entirety of the film.
While the singer’s music is central (and ever-present; her actual voice appears as often as Jolie’s), the details of her career and her rise to fame are of little interest to Larraín. He reduces them to an introductory montage burned into grainy film, as if every moment of her performance was documented in great detail and therefore didn’t need to be the film’s focus. Rather than recreating a public performance, much of the film switches rhythmically, often impulsively, between Callas’ past and present, as if in a haphazard, stream-of-consciousness portrayal. This approach certainly has its merits; the film is always moving, so at least it never gets boring. But it doesn’t always move with purpose, and it tends to repeat itself without finding new aspects to the story.
On the plus side, Ed Lachman’s stunning cinematography lends the film’s present a melancholy feel. Scenes from the 1970s, in which Maria reminisces while walking through Paris (creating a moment of musical greatness where the real world collides with her imagined operatic world) or where she visits an opera pianist to help him rehearse and recapture lost glory, are depicted in the warm tones of an eternal sunset. The film may be anchored by these scenes (as well as numerous flashbacks resulting from her actual conversations and others), but they’re saturated with a sense of finality and time pressing, as if Callas were painfully aware of his own approaching mortality.
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Her flashbacks tend to take two particular forms. Like the grainy film footage mentioned above, spotlit performance scenes of Callas silhouetted in silhouette serve as brief, nostalgic memories of her singing once more, attempting to recapture lost glory. But the film’s fuller flashbacks play out in stark black and white, as if these moments were more perfectly preserved. This canvas has several flashbacks to Callas’s eventful younger years (played by Agelina Papadopoulou), but at its heart is her time with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Haruk Birginer), with whom she had a long affair before marrying Jackie Kennedy.
The film presents an aging Onassis as a comical, resentful figure, and Bilginer plays him with venomous charisma, but his frequent appearances in Callas’s memories are never quite justified. Dialogue suggests they might have been each other’s greatest lovers, and the film even imagines a wonderful moment of private confession between them, but Onassis comes across more as obligatory than as someone who deeply affected Callas rather than merely lightly. But this and other shortcomings of the film are ultimately brushed aside by the performances of its leads.
Angelina Jolie leads a phenomenal cast.
Cinematic Maria The film wouldn’t work without the performances of its central characters: outside of Callas, the two other characters who get the majority of the screen time are Bruna and Ferruccio, and although their roles are fixed, they offer an intimate and affectionate look at the iconic vocalist.
As Bruna, the woman trained by Callas to live a godly life, Rohrwacher deflects her true feelings (and real concerns) from her loyalty, while Ferruccio is far more outspoken in his opposition to Callas’s drug use, and Favino retains a heartbreaking affection for Callas, even as he is often harshly but calmly rebuked. The real Ferruccio would not sell Callas’s private story even after her death, so the film paints a fanciful interpretation of her later years, but Ferruccio’s loyalty is justified, especially when a real reporter brutally tries to invade her privacy.
But all of this would be for naught if Callas wasn’t perfectly cast in the role. Larraín has used real people as his subjects in the past. Neruda “The Last Journey” is about the poet and statesman Pablo Neruda, whose three Hollywood biopics all explore the power and glamour of fame, and Kristen Stewart was a perfect fit for Larraín’s film. Spenceris a story about a very misunderstood woman who is constantly under fire, and Jolie is a perfect choice for the role, given the extent to which she is. Maria This work depicts the struggle between the pain and allure of living in the spotlight.
Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”
Credit: Netflix
Jolie was not only a famous actress, but arguably one of the most famous people in the world in the mid-2000s, rising to a level of global stardom that most people could never dream of. However, her celebrity has come a long way from breaking up a family. Accusation A disastrous public separation Alleged Domestic violence (her The fight against breast cancer It became a tabloid topic, but Jolie was the first to go public with it. At the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere, asked While she didn’t go into detail about how much of her personal life she incorporated into her acting, the extent to which she shows her most vulnerable self on screen is telling. MariaShe clearly doesn’t need to: everything she has to say on the subject fits within the four corners of the frame.
Jolie plays Callas at her lowest point, both physically and emotionally, seemingly trying to balance the grace and poise of an opera legend with the somberness of a resigned character. She is completely sure of herself when talking to others, yet secretly lacks self-confidence. Jolie plays out this duality not only in the scenes, but also in conversations, sometimes turning away from her co-stars and sometimes leaning in close.
Callas is a character full of contradictions. She’s a woman haunted by her past yet constantly seeking praise. She’s haunted by her past, but it’s the same past that drives her music, and it’s crucial that she tap into the most painful parts of her story in order to find herself again. Jolie’s performance feels in tune with the actress’ own history; the deeper Callas delves into her soul, the more the curtain falls. You can see Jolie and her character becoming one, crying out in unison for just being herself, for some kind of respite from living at a constant level of prominence no matter how much they love the spotlight. It’s heartbreaking to witness.
But Jolie takes it a step further by creating this semi-fictional version of Callas not only as a real woman, but as someone destined, perhaps cursed, to be immortalized on screen. Real Crow She spoke in a more conversational, more clearly Greek intonation than Jolie does here, but rather than imitate her, she spoke in a classic Hollywood, Sounds from across the Atlantic.
The accent is easy to pick out, but Jolie’s masterstroke is in the way she uses her voice. Not only does she sing (which sounds fantastic to this critic’s untrained ear), but her speaking voice sounds higher-pitched, as if it were coming through a 1940s or 50s microphone at a higher frequency. The film is set in 1977, but the 40s and 50s were Callas’ professional heyday. What better way to cinematically represent her ideal self?
The crow is having difficulty standing up MariaDrugs have her senses dulled, not just literally but mentally. The film as a whole may be scattered and lose its way along the way, but all the while Jolie is caught in a constant battle to live (and die) with dignity, experiencing all the fears and certainties that come with a woman gradually accepting that her life may be nearing its end.
Larraín usually loves to show off his production design (with sets this gorgeous, who wouldn’t?) and loves to make the camera dance, but he’s cleverest in this movie. Maria It’s his job to get out of Jolie’s way at the right time; in the more intimate or sensitive scenes, he refrains from flourishing, allowing her to dictate the story’s most intense and harrowing moments. But in the rare moments when Jolie’s acting matches the film’s operatic formalism–as Callas inches closer to finding herself on her musical quest–the results are utterly shocking.
Maria The film was considered for its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
