Writer: Steven Knight
Director: Pablo Larraín
It sounds like a casting nightmare: Angeline Jolie as Maria Callas. But defying her critics, Jolie pulls it off with ease. Every inch the queen and every inch the diva, Jolie’s role as the opera icon should see her in the Academy Awards nominations next year. It’s a career-changing performance.
Maria starts in black and white with Callas singing directly to the audience. Jolie is not lip-synching but actually singing, her voice mixed with Callas’s in post-production. The American actor trained for seven months to replicate the breathing and pose of an opera singer, and you can see the result as her lips protrude and her neck quivers when she sings arias by Puccini and Donizetti. Even if she is miming along some of the time, Jolie knows exactly when to take a breath or tremble her lips in vibrato.
While the narrative, in this, the third in the trilogy about Twentieth-century female icons by Pablo Larraín, is fragmented and out of order, the role of Callas seems comfortably old-fashioned. Stories about queens at the end of their reigns is a film staple from Sunset Boulevard to The Iron Lady, as well as Spencer and Jackie, Larraín’s other two films in his trilogy. And when Callas is harassed by paparazzi towards the end of Maria, one can’t help but be reminded of Amy Winehouse and the way the papers hounded the Camden singer, another queen of music who died too soon.
Maria nominally charts the last seven days of the life of the American-Greek soprano living in Paris in 1977. But because she knocks back so many sedatives, she has flashbacks and fantasy interviews where a young journalist asks her about her childhood in Greece or her love affair, much later, with Aristotle Onassis. The past is reimagined in crisp black and white, while the interview scenes are in bleached-out colour. Callas knows that her sense of time is slipping but welcomes the sense of freedom that comes with it. However, her heightened self-confidence is just a way of not facing the truth about her waning body.
Her voice has already diminished, and every lunchtime, she sings for an English pianist in an empty music hall, hoping to find once more the musical talent that led to her being called ‘La Callas’. The piano player tells her he just hears “Maria Callas”, but still, she should persevere. Only Bruna, the housemaid, declares that her mistress’s voice is magnificent, although Callas is not so self-centred to wholeheartedly believe the compliments from such a lowly source.
But she loves to be adored and goes to cafes in Paris where she will be recognised. And it’s in these scenes where Jolie convinces the most, an ice queen with a voice of fire. She gives Callas a regalness that we never see any more; she never drops her crown, even when she is in the middle of a drug-induced fantasy. Everyone does adore her, after all.
And if the film is to have one fault, it is the fact that all those around have superhuman talents in patience, most blatantly seen in her two loyal servants, Bruna and Ferruccio. They have no other lives beyond the Paris apartment, always at their employer’s beck and call. Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) advises Callas to see a doctor, and Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) collects all the sedatives that Callas has hidden in her wardrobe, but it would be refreshing to see either of them smash a glass or raise a voice in frustration in Steven Knight’s screenplay.
Even Onassis, on his deathbed, a telling calculator on the bedside table to signal that he was one of the richest men in the world, declares his undying love for Callas. No one is immune to her charm and beauty, although we hear, indirectly, about the press that criticised her for cancelling concerts at the last minute. But almost to the end, Callas’s voice and her melodramatic acting would always win over the crowds.
And like her sympathetic audiences, we forgive Callas and Jolie for each tragic glance to the side, each foretelling look up to the skies through her oversized glasses. We will forgive them for everything like we would for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. There’s something of their haughty disdain in Jolie’s performance that takes us back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. They don’t make divas like they used to.
Maria is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
