Maria is a film depicting the last days of soprano Maria Callas. Streaming on Netflix, the movie directed by Pablo Larraín, is a tour de force for Angelina Jolie who plays the legendary singer. A lot has been made about the accuracy of the events surrounding Callas’ death in Paris at age 53. Similarly, some observers have been turned off by the trope of the tortured artist. None of such objections matter. All that counts is whether the film works. No one cares if Verdi’s Don Carlo doesn’t conform to the real infante of Spain. It’s a great opera because Verdi made it such.
Of course, Larraín’s movie is not up to the standard of Don Carlo, but it works very well due to the director’s vivid, if fragmentary, presentation of Callas’ life and Jolie’s great performance. The film opens with its story’s end — Callas is dead on the floor of her very upscale Paris apartment. It proceeds with a series of flashbacks not in chronological order some of which go back to her adolescence in Athens. The singer was born in New York to immigrant Greek parents. Her mother moved her and her sisters back to Athens where she spent the war years under German occupation.
The Diva is addicted to Mandrax, a combination of methaqualone and diphenhydramine marketed in the US as Quaalude. Maria takes so many of these pills that she spends most of her time hallucinating. So tenuous is her purchase of reality that she herself doesn’t know whether she is in the real or imaginary world from moment to moment.
One of the film’s main characters is Mandrax, an imaginary TV producer/interviewer who follows Maria around Paris, asking probing questions. Many of the scenes in her early life are in black and white, a technique that I usually find off-putting but which works here. Her life in Paris is accompanied almost exclusively by her two devoted servants – Bruna her housekeeper and Ferruccio her butler. Maria, 53 at her death, has not performed for four years and tentatively tries to determine if anything meaningful of her voice remains. She is told that her voice is gone forever.
The key players in her life float in and out of the film, most notably Aristotle Onassis and her sister Yakinthi. But her past and terminal life are more a dream than reality. This approach to the fictional Maria is not unlike the life and career of the real Maria.
Callas had a life in art more mysterious than any other I can think of. She cast a spell over audiences and musicians that is impossible to fully explain. If you were not hypnotized by her radiance you heard a singer with a rather unattractive voice who was very musical and who could get every bit of drama out of the music she sang and whose insights were extraordinary. A great artist, but La Divina? No. I heard her at the Met during the 50s and was not spellbound. But my opinion of her art was unimportant then and even more so now. The verdict has been cast and Callas is a performer for the ages. Thus in a way, Larraín’s portrayal of a great artist tortured by the past who spends almost all of her time in a dream is true in a semi-psychotic way. Her voice at its best lasted only about a decade. Its peak corresponded with that of her frequent partner tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano. He was as extraordinary a performer as Callas, but no one will ever make a movie about him.
Jolie’s performance is extraordinary. She is said to have spent seven months preparing for the role. She started with no knowledge of opera and learned to sing some of the music coming from the title character. Her director said that her singing in the movie was a varying blend of Jolie and Callas. The result is a sound that is actually smoother than that produced by Callas alone. Jolie’s portrayal of the simultaneously imperious and intoxicated artist is dazzling. It alone justifies seeing seeing the film. Though the rest of the cast is excellent, it is Jolie who overrides everything else in the movie. You don’t have to be an opera aficionado to appreciate this film.
The music of the soundtrack consists of famous excerpts mostly from the operas in which Callas appeared. Though some of it was not written for the soprano. ‘Ebben? Ne andro lontana’ from Catalani’s La Wally was often sung by Callas in recital and on records though the opera was not in her repertoire.
Highly recommended. A great performance about a great performer.
Jolie did an outstanding performance as Callas. Enjoyed the music.