The triumphant third film in Pablo Larraín’s lonely-lady trilogy, a study of Maria Callas in later years, could premiere only at Venice International Film Festival. This was where the Chilean director debuted Jackie, his film about Jacqueline Kennedy, and Spencer, his study of Princess Diana. More importantly, Venice helped create the legend of Callas. It was here, in 1949, with only six days’ notice, that she took over the role of Elvira in Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani and sent the musical world into raptures.
Larraín’s film could hardly have the same effect on Angelina Jolie – she is, to put it mildly, already pretty well known – but he has finally given her the role she has long deserved. Maria is a heart-clutchingly sad performance in a film that manages enormous sympathy for a woman who once had it all. “I took liberties all my life,” Steven Knight’s script has her say. “And the world took liberties with me.”
It is Paris of the mid-1970s. She lives in despondent isolation with only two loyal servants for company: Alba Rohrwacher as her cook, Pierfrancesco Favino as her butler. So hooked is Maria on various pills that when she imagines (we think) a visiting film-maker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) she names him for the hypnotic sedative Mandrax. We begin with her death and then travel back a few weeks to watch a desperate attempt at a comeback and halfhearted dabbling with a memoir.
That central thread is, itself, studded with flashbacks to key points in Callas’s development. Misused by Nazi occupiers in Athens during the war. The Venice debut and other key performances. Fans of Larraín’s Jackie will enjoy the cross-textuality of Aristotle Onassis – long her lover but never her husband – taking her to a party for JFK where Jacqueline, later Mrs Onassis, waits unseen in the wings.
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Even those unfamiliar with Callas will need to do some early adjusting. It is something to hear that magnificent noise coming out of Jolie’s mouth. Her charisma is at a different register – if no less potent – from that of the more heavily lacquered opera singer. But, as this hypnotic film progresses, Jolie, conveying vulnerability through tyranny, creates a convincing hybrid. It becomes easy to believe that this version of Callas could exist in Larraín’s altered reality. Knight, who also wrote Spencer, steers clear of sacred-monster cliches. Yes, Callas is here demanding and unreasonable. But all those irritations are overwhelmed by the film’s dedication to memorialising loss on, well, an operatic scale.
This is huge life now taken in small steps through an autumnal Paris. Edward Lachman’s camera finds a warm Kodachrome russet that suits both the period and the mood. (More than anything else, the exteriors suggest Last Tango in Paris.) You couldn’t quite call Maria a musical, but Larraín knows how to stage an aria. While wandering the streets, Mandrax quips: “This is the part of the film where you’re expected to sing.” An elaborate number based on the Humming Chorus from Madama Butterfly fills up the screen.
None of that breaks the exquisitely sustained sense of melancholy. Of its two predecessors, Maria more resembles the (literally) funereal Jackie than the ghostly Spencer. Jolie’s own enormous fame adds more layers of sadness to the picture of a fallen goddess living in quasi-luxurious misery.
The film will have its detractors. Not everyone will buy the transformation. Classical-music experts will certainly find technical fault to compare with those they unearthed at Venice two years ago in Todd Field’s Tár. (No offence meant. All experts do the same.) But Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned. If we may be allowed so vulgar a speculation, it is hard to believe she will not follow Natalie Portman, from Jackie, and Kristen Stewart, from Spencer, to another Oscar nomination for the lonely ladies.
Netflix picked up Maria for US distribution on the first day of the festival. There is, at time of writing, no news of an Irish release date.
