Hide the overflowing ashtrays and move that infernal grand piano – Maria Callas, La Diva, is granting a valedictory TV interview. She’s pacing the halls of her Paris apartment, feeding her poodles and strung out on pills. The visiting journalist is called Mandrax, named after her favourite medication. He takes a seat and checks the mic. By way of introduction, he says, “I’d like to walk with you through your life.”
Callas’s life whisked her from the slums of Nazi-occupied Athens to the concert halls of Europe and the US, through a torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis to collaborations with Pasolini and Zeffirelli. But Pablo Larraín’s opulent Maria shrewdly homes in on the soprano’s final days, showcasing a stiffly dignified Angelina Jolie as the lioness in winter, four years retired and a legend in her own lunchtime. “Make me an appointment with a hairdresser who doesn’t speak,” she orders her doting servants. “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am.” She is in the mood, she adds, for adulation.
Larraín’s film is about Callas but it is also about Jolie, in the same way that Limelight was about Chaplin and Last Tango in Paris about Brando. The Chilean director takes the 49-year-old actor, once the most bankable star in the world, and hangs her like a painting to be stared at, or a priceless statue to be circled. Much will no doubt be made of the fact that Jolie trained for several months to sing the songs in the film, her voice multi-tracked and blended with that of Callas herself. But this is primarily a trophy appointment, the ultimate prestige casting. She’s there because of who she is at least as much as what she does.
And so Maria proceeds, in its stately manner, to walk us through the diva’s life and times, like a straight-backed waiter balancing a silver tray of fine food. Along the way it calls in on Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and schedules a coffee with her stoical older sister (a brief, lovely turn from Valeria Golino). But for most of the tour it sticks close to its star as she navigates her apartment or totters out through the Jardin du Luxembourg. One of the incidental pleasures of Maria is its evocative sense of bourgeois 70s Paris. Here is a city of bistros and bow-ties, complacently untouched by student riots and the Nouvelle Vague.
Most great operas tilt so ardently towards tragedy, loss and death that for non-believers they run the risk of collapsing into camp – and so it is with Maria, which can’t see a molehill without making a mountain; can’t see a laugh line without trying to milk it for tears. Doggedly scripted by Steven Knight, this is the third part of Larraín’s loose trilogy about rich, broken women, following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer. And yet where Spencer tackled its material with a playful savagery, Maria proves a more stilted and self-regarding affair, crucially more in thrall to the cult of the great artist. Callas is late for rehearsal. Her pianist doesn’t mind. “You’re Maria Callas, you’re not late,” he assures her. “Everyone else is early.”
If every opera courts disaster, it follows that the good ones lean into the danger, sustaining their note of keening pathos to slowly enmesh us in the drama. And so it proves with the magnificent, declamatory Maria, a film that’s as precious and unwieldy as that pesky grand piano. Midway through, I was all set to file this as a posturing distraction, destined for a life as a high-camp curio. But it ground me down, won me over and by the closing credits, God help us, I was hoping for an encore.
• Maria screened at the Venice film festival.
