Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín, Jonas Dornbach, Lorenzo Mieli and Pablo Larraín Director: Pablo Larraín Screenplay: Stephen Knight Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Valeria Golino, Stephen Ashfield, Paul Spera, Vincent Macaigne, Lydia Koniordou, Alessandro Bressanello, Caspar Phillipson and Aggelina Papadopoulou Distributor: Netflix
Grade: C+
The third of Pablo Larraín’s films about an iconic woman caught up in emotional distress, following those on Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, focuses on 1950s operatic diva Maria Callas, who may be known by many today more for her relationship with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, which ended with his marriage to the widowed Jackie, than for her superstardom on the world’s musical stages. Stephen Knight’s screenplay focuses on the final week of her life in September, 1977, when, dependent on drugs, she dreamed of resurrecting her career while haunted by memories of the past and hallucinating about the present.
The place is Paris, where Callas (played with supreme elegance by Angelina Jolie), then fifty-three, lives in an opulent Paris apartment, alone but for her devoted butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), and her many mementos. She’s visited, in what amounts to a sad screenwriting crutch, by one Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), an interviewer who is presumably a figment of her imagination, since his name is that of the medication she’s hooked on. As he grows increasingly infatuated with her, she recalls fragments of her life, for instance how as a promising young singer (Aggelina Papadopoulou) in Greece, she and her sister Yakinthi were pimped out to Nazi officers by their mother Litsa (Lydia Koniordou).
Other flashbacks scattered throughout the film, combining archival footage and reenactments, include far happier moments from her triumphs in the great opera houses of Europe and America, in which we hear, via Callas’ recordings, the power of her voice during its prime—not sensuously beautiful, perhaps, but dramatically overwhelming—and scenes showing the adulation showered on her in lavish social gatherings.
Knight and Larraín indicate that it was on one such occasion that she met Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who effectively courted her with his wealth and prominence even as her then-husband Giovanni Meneghini (Alessandro Brassanello) looked on helplessly, frustrated by the magnate’s attention to her. The film effectively follows their affair from 1959, when she left Meneghini, to 1968, when Onassis broke off the relationship to marry Kennedy, as the central romance of Callas’ life, one that continued until his death in 1975, when, at least here, she visited him as he lay dying, though their conversation was interrupted by the untimely arrival of his wife. It takes up the greatest portion of the “past” here, even allowing for quirky asides, like a scene in which Callas is approached by John Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), only for her to turn him down while informing him that his wife and Aristotle are involved.
The 1977 material has its own surprise touches—like a sequence in which Callas meets her sister Yakinthi (Valeria Golino) at a café hoping for some sympathy, only to be told she should forget the past. But for the most part it languidly covers several basic threads. One focuses on Ferruccio and Bruna’s efforts to curtail Callas’ drug use, an exercise in futility even after they call in a doctor (Vincent Macaigne) to explain how she’s killing herself. Another concerns her secretive attempt to restore her voice after years of decline, which introduces both English conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Asfield) and a rehearsal pianist (Paul Spera) but ends badly in an embarrassing leak about the state of her voice to an intrusive music critic.
But a third element has to do with the diva’s hallucinatory experiences while roaming the streets and plazas of Paris. At one point the passing crowd suddenly begins singing the “Anvil Chorus” from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” as she stares at them solemnly, and at another a full orchestra is playing on the steps of a building in the rain while a group of geishas intone the “Humming Chorus” from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” These are moments that hauntingly recall the diva’s past glory and present despair, and as staged and shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, who brings gorgeous tones to his impeccably composed images throughout (a tone accentuated by Guy Hendrix Dyas’ luscious production design and Massimo Cantini Parrini’s exquisite costumes), they gingerly enter surrealistic territory (in the Puccini scene, Mandrax appears like the director of the film, directing Callas to sing), but without making much of an impression apart from a quizzically raised eyebrow. What, you might ask, are we meant to be feeling here?
That’s the essential problem with “Maria” that Larraín fails to solve. Simply put, unlike Callas’ singing, the movie is practically devoid of passion, except in the brief flashbacks to her stage performances and the reaction to them, or the rehearsal scenes in which Callas shows genuine fear and defeatism. Even the episodes with Onassis are staged like emotionless tableaux, the conversations stilted and formal. And everyone moves with agonizing slowness, as though we’re expected to intuit that each pause is pregnant with profound but elusive meaning. The entire film feels chilly and remote.
The deliberation enforced by Larraín and editor Sofía Subercaseaux informs the performance of Jolie, who affects as her default mode a regal bearing that can’t efface a sense of pain in unguarded moments, as when looking in a mirror as Bruna brushes her hair. That’s the attitude she exudes in both the contemporary scenes and those set in the past—the haughtiness of the prima donna, mixed with an undercurrent of insecurity, even when in the presence of important admirers. Jolie certainly pulls it off, and one has to admire in particular her devotion to making the vocalism convincing in the 1977 sequences (which combines her singing with fragments of the real Callas, as opposed to the latter untouched in the flashbacks). But there’s no denying that while the avoidance of overwrought melodrama is laudable, the result is rather mannered and muffled.
“Maria” and Jolie are both stunning to behold, but as with the earlier films in Larraín’s triptych, the result is uneven and often dramatically inert.