Maria: Pablo Larraín’s grand, reverential biopic of Maria Callas

• Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival

Pablo Larraín refracts another 20th-century figure of fame and misfortune in his portrait of opera legend Maria Callas. Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021) centred on women in the public eye and hitched to powerful husbands, while Maria gazes upon an artist who cast her own shadow on a whole tradition of musical performance, looking back from her medicated final days to visions of her past, when her voice was strong but her spirit still wounded – hurt by wartime trauma, expectations (hers and others’) and an overbearing husband.  

Callas first appears unceremoniously, deceased and obscured by furniture in her high-ceilinged Paris apartment, in 1977, at just 53 years of age. The film explores the weeks prior, as she putters about at home and around Paris and attempts to rekindle her voice, recounting her memories partly to a visiting television journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee). But this putative interviewer’s name is Mandrax, a drug she takes, making her remembrances feel like troubled reveries broadcast from a grand but out-of-touch present. Larraín tends to spin his biographical films through kaleidoscopic narrative rather than straight-up illustrative flashbacks, with Maria structurally somewhere between Jackie and Neruda (2016).  

That approach can lend a complexity or a sense of life’s surprises, and avoid (or obfuscate) a rise-and-fall arc, but it also puts pressure on the performer to hold the centre. Dressed in Callas’s garments and chunky glasses – the singer had vision problems – Jolie has undeniable presence and regal poise, and speaks in the witty aphorisms of scriptwriter Steven Knight’s dialogue. (“I took liberties all my life, and the world took liberties with me.”) But Jolie seems to be playing the idea of the tragic diva more than a person reacting to the world. That’s the case whether during the fade-out of her final weeks, or the prime of her career. The biopic convention of showing documentary footage of the subject is especially risky in Maria, showing us an animated personality that’s lacking in Jolie’s performance. 

The movie makes an entertaining routine of Callas and her two doting attendants, housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and stooped butler Ferruccio (a touchingly caring Pierfrancesco Favino). She hides her pills, they worry, she wanders off, Feruccio shadows her. In a recurring bit, she makes them move a grand piano around again and again despite Feruccio’s bad back. On her outings, she visits a cafe, and rehearses at a theatre with an indulgent accompanist (Stephen Ashfield). The opera vocals in those and other scenes are apparently sometimes Callas, other times a shifting mix of Callas and Jolie. The memories of grand performances can revive the film at times, especially when staged as a mix of reality and fantasy, as with choruses from Madama Butterfly or Il Trovatore, but Larrain’s attempts to evoke emotional connections through the use of certain operas do not always yield fruit. 

The jetset nature of Callas’s life in her prime is on display here – wooed by a boundlessly arrogant shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) who becomes a man-you-love-to-hate rake – as well as seminal moments like a show-stopping performance in Venice. Shot by Ed Lachman (who also worked with Larraín on 2023’s El Conde), this legendary past is in elegantly modulated black-and-white. But the present, in colour, is almost more striking, with its astonishing texture and detail and subtlety in hues, seen in everything from Callas’s wardrobe and bed to the minutiae in the kitchen (Guy Hendrix Dyas’s production design is typically rich) or the fine distinctions in colour between the gleam of a car headlight and a streetlamp’s glow. Far from eye candy, this craft infuses the present with an added emotional life that’s valuable to fleshing out Callas’s world. 

While Callas is doubtlessly run down by the demands of both her art and her fame, Larraín – no stranger to chronicling ugly abuses buried in the past (see 2015’s The Club) – also cuts back to a haunting sequence in the singer’s wartime childhood as a teenager in occupied Greece. Her mother pushes her and her sister to sing for two Nazi officers who visit their flat, and it’s suggested that she was also forced to sell her body. One of the film’s most moving scenes is Callas meeting as an adult with her sister Yakinthi (Valeria Golino) who tells her firmly: “Close the door, little sister. You’re not to blame.” 

If there is a remoteness and a hurt in Callas that she ultimately could not numb or outrun, one key then may lie in these predations in her youth; later, Onassis’s romantic possessiveness did its own kind of harm. Perhaps in Jolie and Larraín’s portrayal, the art of Callas lives on, but in all the veneration, so too did the pain.