Director: Pablo Larraín
Writer: Steven Knight
Stars: Angelina Jolie, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino
Synopsis: Follows the life story of the world’s greatest opera singer, Maria Callas, during her final days in 1970s Paris.
Pablo Larraín is one of the most recognized Chilean filmmakers working today. While his features about how the political administrations in the country have plagued one generation after another received plenty of acclaim from critics and film festival attendees, it was not until Jackie that he began to get more eyes on this work worldwide. The Jackie Kennedy biopic, with Natalie Portman as the widow in her best performance to date, blends true-to-life scenarios with a ghost story-esque element that explores the political figure’s grief and trauma and her struggles with her governmental surroundings. Larraín’s vision for exploring her condition is meshed with rigorous psychological constraints, although Jackie’s external demeanor is controlled and calculated, even amongst the people she internally loathes.
A few years later, Larraín released a companion piece about another historical figure with a tragic life with Spencer, this time covering the life of Princess Diana. Different from the 2016 feature, Spencer plays more with the horror genre; the fairytale setting of Sandringham turns into the Overlook hotel, switching from dreamy illusions to a complete nightmare–embodied by the lavish cinematography by Claire Mathon and Kristen Stewart’s magnetic portrayal of Diana. An incubus of desolation builds around the estate as the few scenes of happiness are followed by agony and angst forged by the urge to escape the castle where the princess (and her family name) is trapped.
Through two thematically distant yet similar haunting approaches, Larraín crafts tales about what David Lynch would name them in Inland Empire: women in trouble, whether by their choking surroundings or suppressed emotions by performing to mask their trauma. Beauty and inner madness meet with one another in a cinematically poised contraption that holds more to the sensory and atmospheric elements of ghost stories rather than the regular biopic mold that has been played out for decades. Tortured souls explored a specific time in their lives where an incident–the assassination of their partner or a hostile family visit–paves the way for liberation or further subjugation by the public. But either way, Larraín does such with care and admiration, without dwelling on trauma porn or exploiting their conditions at the time.
Now, a third project arrives to close out this trilogy of biographical portraits covering salient 20th-century women. The subject of this latest one is Maria Callas, the American-born Greek soprano known for her sublime bel canto technique and wide range vocally. Her unique gifts of three octaves blessed the ears of everyone who has gotten a chance to listen to her impressive, distinctive voice. Such power and presence had great stature when she was on center stage; each note had emotion, a certain verve that made even the most simplistic pieces into something astonishing and heartbreaking. But, she began suffering from a neuromuscular disorder, alongside other complications, that slowly was feeding her voice to the void.
The famed opera singer was losing her gift. A couple of years after doctors ignored this illness, she gave her final performance in 1974 and withdrew from public life. Callas spent her days living in her Paris apartment in somewhat isolation. Larraín’s film, titled Maria (playing at the Spotlight section of this year’s NYFF), covers that part of her life near her death in 1977. Similar to Jackie and Spencer, Maria uses a ghost story to explore Callas’ life in her most vulnerable period. We first see Maria Callas (played by Angelina Jolie in what many consider her comeback role) covered in a white gown that makes her look like a ghostly presence inside her luxurious Paris apartment, as strings from the score cover the atmosphere in splendor and melancholy.
You feel it down your spine; her commanding essence then covers the screen via a monochrome palette to divide the past (the woman in all her glory) and the present (the lost version of the angel-voiced singer). Jolie, who has always had a very magnetic screen presence, makes the frame hers as Callas’ bravura intertwines with the actress’s grandiosity–the pairing of two souls, matching Portman with Jackie and Stewart with Diana, in a collision of wistful ethos sparked by tragedy. Although Jolie’s work here does not convince thoroughly as the film reaches its second and third acts, the camera loves her and makes her shine bright. Callas has two paid companions in her apartment: housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino).
Bruna and Ferruccio are the only people in her life who try their best to help her. Without knowing, Maria has contracted two angels to keep her safe, even if sometimes they aren’t successful because she ignores their pleas. The two do what they are told, even when they know Maria will not partake in it. Moving a piano from one side to the other, knowing she won’t play it; saying that her performance is excellent as her voice racks and shakes as a high note arrives. These are acts of love. It is the affection Callas needs now more than ever. Deep inside, Bruna and Ferruccio know they can do nothing to save her from succumbing to the mourning of her gracious voice that has been long gone by that point.
Both Rohrwarcher and Ferrucio bring to life fictional characters that shine a brighter light than the titular one helmed by the famed actress. The Italian actors have a glistening spirit that makes the brooding atmosphere between dreams and nightmares–purgatory and bliss–feel like it has life inside. They are the heart and soul of Maria, pouring these silenced emotions through a telepathic connection with the audience since Jolie, as the film shifts through various stylistic endeavors and wallowing scenarios, cannot inveigle the audience by the faux empathy curated by Larraín and Knight’s screenplay–she has to rely on her acting chops, which, in some scenes more than others, crumble upon the weight of Callas’ essence.
Lachman occasionally forces some prowess by having Jolie in plentiful, beautifully crafted scenes–both in black and white and color—containing a luscious hazy coating that makes everything feel like a daydream when in sunlight. Yet, she is not up to the task. Maria focuses on that lament for the past, which Larraín and cinematographer Edward Lachman (Carol, El Conde) beautifully frame in black and white sequences. It adds a soul-stirring nostalgia to those scenes. Jolie has her Callas glancing to the distance; she wants to reach that past version of her, which had the glamor and gift of the gods. It is something impossible to achieve.
Like one of the lines in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance says: “What has been taken by the other can not be replaced”. Yet the pain continues to sting her daily living. The inability to move on from the loss of her one true love, Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and her voice has left her as a living ghost, kept safe by two guardian angels. But she tries to remain composed, uncovering her face in a veil of equanimity. All of that begins to crack upon the arrival of a mysterious guest, a reporter named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the human embodiment of the sedative that has taken control of Callas’ body, mind, and soul.
Larraín’s dissections of these women’s turmoils arrive with a tragic tone, almost to the point where you believe the director defines their history by their woes. In Jackie and Spencer, that thought does not cross your mind because of the empathy being provided by Larraín and the writers attached. Even though Maria has similar scenes where there are brinks of happiness scattered across the setting, the film does not explore why the subject feels this way, why Callas sees herself as a doomed soul riddled by reminiscence and the sentimentality shared in the grand stages where her voice towered all. Larraín and Steven Knight, who also wrote Spencer, have a motif repeated in Maria: Callas signs to herself in hopes that her voice will return one day.
They mean that this is her attempt to finally come to terms with her present life, isolated from the world that praised her and showered her with flowers after each performance. However, this exploration is diminished by the persistence of over-imposing the vicissitude of her life rather than the division of vulnerability and cognizance, which the two previous installments in this trilogy did very well. Jackie and Spencer also had similar criticisms. Yet, in Maria, it is more prevalent, with a dilapidated view of her mental state, nearly reaching a callous state. Visually, the film is as elegant as you would imagine. The costumes and settings have that opulence that matches Callas’ elegance and poise. However, some stylistic choices by Larraín and Lachman are highly questionable or without much reason.
That is the least of worries when the screenplay limits the range of character dissection. It is a shame that the curtain closer to this fascinating trilogy idea comes up short with all of the necessary ingredients available. Maria feels as if Larraín and Knight did not have that vision for a portrait of Callas, unlike his previous features. They find themselves limited thematically and story-wise. Larraín mainly presents a film about internal suffering instead of identity and freedom, the critical element to the previous biographical portraits’ success. The spell is broken, and so little enchantment reaches the viewer. The ghostly sensation is left adrift for colder narrative breakdowns.