There has, since Pablo Larraín’s study of Maria Callas premiered at Venice International Film Festival in August, been a critical cooling on the project. Does it not allow the great diva enough agency? Is it disrespectful to reduce her to a few sad rooms on one forbiddingly beautiful street? All of which queries miss the sincere skill with which the Chilean director confronts a huge life now taken in the smallest steps. Everyone is ultimately alone at the end.
The casting of Angelina Jolie, not an obscure figure herself, invites superficial ponderings about what extreme fame does to the middle-aged woman, but it also confirms that the director is mindful of his subject’s dignity. There aren’t many movie stars of that magnitude left. Nobody cast Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale as a bedsit loser. When, early on, a monochrome Jolie looks down the lens and that noise – a cunning amalgam of Angelina and Maria – emerges from her mouth it is clear that we’re allowing a mythic element to the film.
Larraín is wary of accepting that, after his films Jackie and Spencer, this current title completes a trilogy, but the comparisons with Natalie Portman’s Jacqueline Kennedy and Kristen Stewart’s Lady Diana are unavoidable. Women alone. Women misused. Neither of those characters, however, had the spiritual enormousness of Jolie’s Callas. Who would blame the opera singer for turning inward as the voice began to crispen with age? “I took liberties all my life,” this version says. “And the world took liberties with me.”
We are in the Paris of the 1970s. It is literally and figuratively autumn. Edward Lachman’s camera catches the russets of a cooling city as did Vittorio Storaro for the nearly contemporaneous Last Tango in Paris – a very different film but also one about loss and regret. As interest moves elsewhere, Callas, often hiding behind huge prescription glasses, spends her time chatting with devoted servants, juggling her medication and wandering the uninterested streets.
The last thing our teenage son said was: ‘Why are you all so sad? I’m going to be fine’
Babygirl review: Five stars for a fearless Nicole Kidman’s dive into a hot erotic mess. Bondage has seldom been as playful
10 great films to watch if you’re stuck indoors
50 people to watch in 2025: From film and music to arts, activism, sport and more
Steven Knight’s script begins with an ambulance being called to the apartment and then jags from the recent past to misuse during the German occupation of Greece to triumphant discovery in Venice and back to an apparently fruitless attempt at a comeback in the 1970s. The pills have become such a controlling force that she imagines a visiting film-maker and names him for the hypnotic sedative Mandrax.
All three of the films in Larraín’s lonely-lady cycle (my description, not his) have allowed immersion in a partly imagined alluring prosperity. Nothing wrong with that. Yes, one could accuse the director of perfume-commercial superficiality in his monochrome shots of Callas’s early career. But there is no point pretending that these women’s fame did not rest on tragic glamour. There is here some attempt to grasp the real human – insofar as such a thing is possible – but there is also an enjoyable wallow in the gorgeousness of it all. The use of home-movie footage and the addition of a Kodachrome fuzz to the film’s sadder present reminds us that none of this will last.
One can understand why not everyone has taken to Maria. As I guessed in first viewing at Venice, the same classical-music boffins who railed against Tár two years ago have, perfectly reasonably, taken issue with the treatment of Callas’s professional life. Others have felt that the project diminishes an icon. (For once that cliched term is applicable.) But Larraín has, with these projects, never been in the business of verisimilitude. Yes, the film concerns itself with the closing tragedies of a much-documented life. But it is also a work of imagination that makes risky decisions about a partly invented chimera. It draws up its own legends. It makes its own rules. Which is just the sort of thing opera does.
Maria is in cinemas from Friday, January 10th
