The final film in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s triptych of portraits of wealthy, influential, melancholy women, Maria stars a magnetic Angelina Jolie as autocratic, temperamental soprano Maria Callas. Like Jackie and Spencer it’s a film about grief. But what Callas mourns, in the week leading up to her death in September 1977, is not a husband, as with Jackie Kennedy, or a marriage, as with Diana, Princess of Wales, but the loss of her younger self: the celebrated prima donna whose career broke records and whose voice broke hearts.
Naturally, Maria is steeped in opera. It’s present in the mise-en-scène, which turns the streets of 70s Paris into a grand stage, complete with full orchestra and chorus. La Divina, Jolie-style, is as much a performance as a person – a diva who never encountered a rococo staircase she couldn’t imperiously sweep down. There are operatic levels of drama, too, in the costume choices: fur, brocade and anything that can be swished are favoured.
Mostly, though, it’s a film about the music itself: recordings of Callas’s unique voice are blended with Jolie’s own singing. A few quirky fantasy elements and stylistic garnishes notwithstanding, Larraín’s approach to the Callas legend is reverential, almost to the point of open worship. Non-opera fans may find their tolerance tested.
Music vies with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer, in flashbacks) for the title of significant other. Onassis, the film suggests, was Callas’s love, but music was her passion, her reason for living and, in a suitably operatic fictional flourish, her companion in death.
In UK and Irish cinemas
