Over almost two decades, Chilean director Pablo Larraín has been making Spanish-language films that have ranged from creepy tales (“Fuga,” “Post Mortem”) to political stories (“No,” “Neruda”) to character studies (“Tony Manero,” “Ema”) to, well, creepy political character studies (“El Conde”). For the last eight of those years, though, Larraín has had a parallel career making a trio of English-language films that draw their one-word titles from the names of the famous women at their center: first 2016’s “Jackie,” starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the days following the assassination of her husband, U.S. President John F. Kennedy; then 2021’s “Spencer,” with Kristen Stewart as Diana Spencer, the soon-to-be Princess of Wales, on a fraught weekend at the British royal family’s country home; and now “Maria,” with Angelina Jolie as opera diva Maria Callas.
Those three films make an unlikely triptych of adventurous, dark fantasias about iconic women under extreme pressure. But “Maria,” which was bought by Netflix prior to its Venice Film Festival premiere, is in some ways a counterintuitive way to follow up “Jackie” and “Spencer.” Those first two films were florid, sometimes deliciously overwrought (“Jackie” more effectively so than “Spencer”) and often flirting with hysteria – and given the fact that “Maria” is set in the wildly theatrical world of grand opera, you’d expect it to be the most florid and overwrought of the bunch. Instead, in many ways it’s the most restrained; the music of Puccini and Verdi is there to supply the grand emotional flourishes, but the film itself is dreamlike and almost studiously placid.
Like the first two installments of Larraín’s famous-women chronicles, “Maria” is exquisitely beautiful but also elusive; it explores Callas but has no interest in defining her, explaining her or pinning her down. And where “Jackie” was a virtuoso exercise in tension and “Spencer” occasionally went off the rails, the new film feels controlled and precise, with a brilliantly burnished glow courtesy of cinematographer Ed Lachman (recently Oscar nominated for his work on Larraín’s “El Conde”).
Partly, that’s because Callas herself always insisted on remaining in control. If “Jackie” and “Spencer” were about women fighting not to go crazy and lose control, “Maria” is about one who is at peace with her craziness. She may slip in and out of a fantasy world at times, but it’s her fantasy world. “As of this morning,” she tells her faithful housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher) at one point, “what is real and what is not real is my business.”
Any opera worth its high C needs a great death scene, and that’s where “Maria” begins, with Callas lying on the floor of her unfathomably lavish Paris flat, surrounded by ornate furnishings and dead of a heart attack at the age of 53. But it doesn’t stay there for long, instead cutting to a black-and-white closeup of the diva singing “Ave Maria (Desdemona)” from Verdi’s “Otello.” The voice clearly belongs to Callas, because you can’t make a movie about her and have a movie star deliver the arias, but Jolie manages to not look out of place – and at times throughout the film, Larraín’s vocal mix does combine the actress and the diva.
Callas’ own music is heard constantly in the film, and often serves as a portal to other times and other worlds – in the case of “Ave Maria,” summing up an entire career in the space of an aria.
The bulk of the movie takes place during the final week of its subject’s life, albeit with those copious flashbacks. It’s set in a time in which Callas can no longer be the grand diva with the incomparable voice, but every move can still be imperious and royal. She walks through the house slowly and deliberately, measures her words and deploys them dramatically; her reputation as a fearsome uber-diva precedes her, and she knows it and uses it.
She’s also addicted to pills and has visions of her dead boyfriend, Aristotle Onassis, almost every night. But she has no interest in changing her medication to control the visions, so the woman and the film both toy with the notion of reality.
This is ideal territory for Larraín, who’s long evinced an interest in using artful fantasy to get at the heart of real people. Callas tells her staff of two (the second being a butler played by Pierfrancesco Favino) that she’s got a TV crew coming to interview her that morning, and shrugs off the question of whether or not the crew is real. Sure enough, a cameraman and an interviewer (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) do show up and she does spar with them on and off for the course of the movie – but that doesn’t mean they’re not figments of her imagination.
Or maybe they’re a way for her to be her true self. “Perhaps we can speak a little about your life away from the stage,” the interviewer says at one point, and Callas’ answer is quick: “There is no life away from the stage. The stage is in my mind.”
The stage is also in the dressing room of her home, which is lined with marble busts as if supplying its own audience. And it’s on the streets of Paris, where a crowd walking by the Eiffel Tower can morph into an opera chorus and a bare theater in which she and a lone pianist are practicing can be filled with adoring fans by the time she gets halfway through her aria.
Larraín’s Callas is in love with those adoring fans, and her long-suffering housemaid and butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) are accustomed to her needs. “Book me a table in a café where the waiters know who I am,” she says to her butler at one point. “I’m in the mood for adulation.”
The film tells a sad story as it slides inexorably toward the ending that we know is coming, but it also suggests there was a very good reason for that adulation, and a reason why it came with a price. When her sister tells her to close the door to the damaging memories from a brutal childhood, Callas shakes her head. “I can’t,” she says. “It’s the only way the music gets in.”
Does the music do a lot of the heaving lifting in “Maria?” Sure, and why not? It’d be hard to imagine a better way to sum up the heartbreak of family tensions than with Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” or a more dramatic way of exploring a fracturing psyche than with the mad scene from “La Boheme,” which in the film shifts back and forth between eras and is alternately thrilling and heartbreaking.
In a movie that is stately on the surface and stormy underneath, Jolie’s drawn, almost architectural features and air of enforced restraint is ideal for Larraín’s vision of Callas. She’s a glorious, luminous wreck, looking for peace but drawn inexorably to a world of grand artifice. “My life is opera,” she says. “There is no reason in opera.”
“Maria” abandons reason, too. And it’s all the better for it.
“Maria” will be released on Netflix later this year.
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