The following spencer and Jackie — A biographical melodrama about Princess Diana and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy — Chilean director Pablo Larraín completes his unofficial trilogy Mariaanother film about a world-famous woman on the verge of death. This time his subject is the iconic Greek-American opera soprano Maria Callas, and although the film doesn’t come together as neatly (or as completely) as the first two films, it’s most powerful because of its towering presence moments far surpassed them.
Maria The story takes place during the last week of Callas’ life, when she retreated from the spotlight and lived in isolation. As Larrain and spencer Screenwriter Steven Knight imagined these crucial days and, unfortunately, the final film is less than the sum of its parts. Yet each of these elements is so refined that the resulting material is not only incredibly moving, but also provides Jolie with a platform to create the most complex performance of her illustrious career.
what is Maria about?
The story is set in 1977, Maria The film opens on the day Callas dies of a heart attack and her body is discovered in her Paris penthouse. It presents the scene from a decidedly ghostly perspective. As Larraín’s handheld camera observes the scene from the next room, it takes on a ghostly presence, framing the rest of the film – set in the previous week – as if it were Callas mailing it from afar. Like some kind of desperate letter that came.
Putting words into the mouth of the deceased can be a risky business, especially when so little is known about her final years. But and and spencer and JackieLarraone’s focus is the intersection of private and public life. As such, his biopic is speculative in nature. his last film was a satire countreimagining Augusto Pinochet as a vampire while Maria It certainly doesn’t go that far—Larraín understandably has more respect for Callas than the Chilean dictator—but it exists in a similar way: as a stylized look at 20th-century history.
A week before her death, Callas worked hard to regain her voice, which had not been fully functioning for some time. However, her withdrawal from the public eye also led to her self-medicating with a largely unregulated cocktail of drugs. Their impact is revealed early in the film. Callas turns to her hard-working butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwach), her key confidant in the film. — claims that she arranged a television interview with a reporter named Mandrax (Kody Smit-McPhee). When he arrives, he’s never in the same room (or on the same shot) with anyone except Karas.
Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”
Image source: Netflix
It’s no surprise that Mandrax is an illusion. In fact, Callas is very aware of his growing detachment from reality, although one can’t help but feel that this may have been a plot twist in earlier drafts. Before Callas’s interview with the ghost reporter begins to yield any valuable material, a few scenes need to pass – namely, personal revelations about Callas’ past and reflections on her reputation that begin to gradually change the tone and tone of the film. Appearance.
Maria Its story is told through ever-changing textures and timelines.
Hollywood biopics—especially their often parodied Musical Variety – tends to follow a standard structure, starting with a pivotal, late-career performance and then the film unfolds in flashback. Maria bucks this trend with a unique narrative purpose, extending the aforementioned late-life moments throughout the film while condensing Callas’ life story into brief flashes of memory.
While the singer’s music is central (and always present; her authentic voice is as much a voice as Jolie’s), Larraigne isn’t interested in the specifics of her career and her rise to fame. He reduces them to an introductory montage etched on grainy celluloid paper, as if these moments in her performance were captured in detail and therefore didn’t need to be the focus of the film. Rather than reenacting a public performance, much of the film shifts rhythmically, often impulsively, between Callas’ past and present, as if it were depicting a haphazard stream of consciousness. This approach certainly has its merits – the movie is constantly in motion, so at least it’s never boring – but it doesn’t always move with purpose and tends to repeat itself without finding new dimensions to the story.
On the plus side, Ed Lachman’s dazzling cinematography makes the film’s presentation feel wistful. In scenes set in the 1970s, Maria is either reminiscing while strolling through Paris—scenes where the real world collides with her imagined opera world to produce moments of musical brilliance—or she visits an opera pianist to help her rehearse and recreate Reclaim lost glory. The paintings are painted in the warm tones of a timeless sunset. The film may be based on these scenes (her dialogue is peppered with countless flashbacks, real or otherwise), but they’re imbued with a sense of finality and running out of time, as if Callas was keen Realizing she was nearing the end.
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Her memories tend to take two specific forms. Like the aforementioned grainy film footage, the moments of public performance—Callas’s silhouette in the spotlight—feel fleeting and nostalgic as she attempts to sing again and reclaim her lost glory. However, the film’s more complete flashback scenes are presented in pristine black and white, as if these moments had been more perfectly preserved. The picture retains some flashbacks to Callas’ turbulent youth (she is played by Agelina Papadopoulou), but the key is her relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haru Bill Kinner), with whom she had a lengthy romance before marrying Jackie Kennedy.
The film depicts the aging Onassis as a comically irritable character, played with vicious charm by Birkina. Yet his frequent presence in Karas’s memory never felt justified. Presumably, during the dialogue, they may have loved each other the most, and the film even imagines a beautiful moment of private confession between them, but Onassis just feels like a compulsory tolerant rather than a supporter of Kara. A far-reaching role. However, this and any other flaws the film may have are ultimately outweighed by its core performance.
Angelina Jolie stars in an extraordinary cast.
movies like this Maria It cannot function without its core performance. Aside from Callas, the two characters who occupy the most screen time are Bruna and Ferruccio, and despite the immutable nature of their assigned roles, they provide intimate, loving perspectives on the iconic singer.
Rohrwacher plays Bruna, a woman whom Callas has trained to be respectful, but who ignores the character’s true feelings (and genuine concerns). Ferruccio, meanwhile, became more outspoken against Callas’ drug use, and while he was often harshly but calmly rebuked, Favino maintained a heartbreaking admiration for Callas. The real Ferruccio never sold Callas’ personal story, not even after her death, so while the film offers a fantastical take on her later years, it still does Ferruccio justice O’s loyalty, especially in moments when real reporters tried to brutally invade her privacy.
However, all of this would be for naught if the character of Callas wasn’t perfectly cast and performed. Larrain has dealt with real people before – his historical novels Neruda It’s the story of poet and politician Pablo Neruda, but his triumvirate of Hollywood biopics all face the implications and temptations of fame. Kristen Stewart’s perfect container for Larraín spencera story about a highly misunderstood woman who is constantly vilified. Jolie was an equally perfect choice considering how successful she has been. Maria It’s about the pain and temptation of living in the spotlight.
Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”
Image source: Netflix
Not only is Jolie a famous actress but arguably one of the most famous people in the world in the mid-2000s, she has reached a level of global stardom that few could even dream of. However, her reputation was marked by various incidents including family crashes. accusation a painful public separation involving allegedly domestic abuse (her fight breast cancer It also became the subject of tabloids, although she promoted it herself first). During a press conference for the premiere at the recent Venice Film Festival, Jolie ask on how much her performance draws on her personal life, although she declined to elaborate. However, seeing the extent to which she can be her most vulnerable self on screen Mariait’s obvious she doesn’t need it. Everything she has to say about the subject is contained within the four corners of the frame.
Jolie plays Callas at a physical and emotional low, her demeanor seeming to be trying to balance the grace and poise of an opera legend with the ponderous poise of a quitter. She’s completely confident in herself when she’s talking to other people, but gets lost in a sea of self-doubt behind closed doors – not just in different scenes, but in one conversation, when Julie turns away Or turning towards her, this duality is shown.
Callas is a place full of paradoxes. She is a woman who both suffers from adulation and constantly seeks it. She is haunted by her past, but her past is the impetus for her music, and understanding the most painful parts of her story is crucial if she wants to find herself again. Jolie’s performance feels parallel to the actress’ own history. The deeper Karas penetrated into her soul, the more the veil slipped. You can almost see Jolie and her characters becoming one, shouting in unison for some kind of respite from simply being themselves and living on a level where they are constantly visible, no matter how much they love the spotlight. It was heart-wrenching to witness.
However, Jolie went a step further in creating this semi-fictionalized version of Callas not just as a real woman, but as a character who was almost destined (and perhaps even cursed) to be immortalized on screen. real callas The tone of speech is more conversational, and the intonation is more distinctly Greek than Jolie’s here. But Jolie didn’t imitate her, instead adopting a classic Hollywood style, transatlantic tone.
The accent is easy to understand, but the beauty of Jolie is her voice. Not just her singing voice – although to this untrained reviewer she sounded beautiful – but her speaking voice, which sounded high-pitched, as if through the 1940s or 1950s. The microphone emits at a higher frequency. The film may be set in 1977, but the 1940s and 1950s were the peak of Callas’s career; what better way to interpret her idealized version of herself in cinematic terms?
Karas struggled to stand upright Maria. Not just literally, as she felt numb from the drugs, but mentally. The film as a whole can feel scattered and can get lost in the middle, but all the while Jolie is locked in a constant battle to hold her head high – to live (and die) with dignity, while experiencing All the fear and a woman slowly coming to terms with the belief that she may be at the end of her life.
Usually, Larraín likes to show off his production design (with such lavish sets, who wouldn’t?), and he likes to make his camera dance, but the smartest thing he does is Maria It was about getting out of Julie’s way at the right time. In more intimate or subtle scenes, he dials back on the pageantry so that her performance can dominate the story in its most powerful, poignant moments. Yet on the rare occasions when the film’s operatic formalism aligns with Jolie’s performance—as Callas inches closer to finding her own moment in her musical exploration—the result is utterly shattering.
Maria The film received its world premiere review at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival.
