Only two letters separate an artist from a diva. A simple article that changes everything. Because divas are known by their last name preceded by that “la” that the press loves so much. Maria Callas was “La Callas” for everyone. No one is as diva as she is. The great opera star, the best singer and also the most mysterious. Perhaps there is also a certain consistency in this way of referring to her, because everyone could see who Callas was on stage, but few could discover who Maria really was in private.
It is known that she was a perfectionist, conscientious and meticulous. That she would abandon rehearsals if her classmates missed a single note and that her health deteriorated to the point that her panic attacks began to be worrying. The last years of her life were spent almost confined in a Parisian apartment where she died at only 53 years old of a cardiac arrest. The secrecy of that time gave rise to a multiplication of rumors, conspiracy theories and fables, and that is why Pablo Larraín decided that the only way to approach Callas was to try to understand who Maria was, according to the legend of the week before her death.
The Chilean director concludes with this surprising biopic her trilogy of real women that began with Jackieabout Kennedy’s widow; continued with Spencer, about Lady Di, and concludes with this Maria about the opera singer. They all agree on one thing, that Pablo Larraín presents them as women locked in a cage where he takes the opportunity to X-ray them. Jackie Kennedy in the White House, where she gives the interview that serves as the main thread of the film; Diana at the Sandringham estate; and now Maria in the house where she died.
It is at this moment, with her death, that Larraín begins, quickly going back a week in time to count down these last days. But she does not do it in a traditional way, but rather she brings out a hallucinatory and dreamlike resource, an interview that the diva offers to an imaginary journalist who shares a name with the drug she compulsively consumes. She confesses fragments of her life to him, which allows the director to go back in time to the artist’s emblematic performances, but also to her adolescence, when her mother blackmailed her (among other things) in front of Nazi officers in Greece. to earn money, a trauma that would accompany her throughout her life.
Maria’s only relationship is with her servants and with a singing teacher with whom she tries to recover a voice she has lost. Not to return to the stage, but for herself. The story of the film focuses on showing a woman who, in the last moments of her life, took control of it, even if no one knew it. Until then, it had always been the property of someone, namely Aristotle Onassis, described as a sexist and selfish man who got what he wanted with a checkbook. Cleverly, Larraín also shows Kennedy but leaves Jackie out of the frame – Onassis abandoned Maria for her -, even playing on a universe shared between all his films, as if the Natalie Portman of this film could enter the scene at any moment.
The film manages to escape the shadow of biopic academic, which was expected of a filmmaker like Pablo Larraín, one of the best chroniclers of the wounds of the Pinochet dictatorship in films like No, Neruda either The Count, who always finds visual and narrative resources to approach her projects in a personal way. Here, she achieves this by mixing formats, placing the whole story in an uncertain space, more dreamy than real, where Maria’s imagination plays fabulous and complete.
This is where she finds her best moments, when the film frees itself from all moorings, as in these musical numbers that burst onto the stage, as when a crowd of men sing the opera to Maria Callas in the middle of the Trocadéro, or that feint in Madame Butterfly where she does not know how to sing. A decision that reaches beautiful moments that culminate in this beautiful performance that paralyzes people in the street.
It’s a shame that the film doesn’t completely surrender to this unreal world, and once the surprise effect has worn off, it ends up being a more conventional film than it should be and probably thinks it is. Despite this, it surpasses the biopics Hollywood musicals put Angelina Jolie among the first names to come out of Venice in a good position for the Oscars. Let’s not forget that Venice is the launch platform for American titles before the awards season and that Maria, who arrived without a distributor, has just been bought by Netflix, which will certainly do everything it can to ensure that Jolie is La Jolie this year. All the protagonists of Larraín’s biopics have been nominated, and the actress’s work on this occasion is remarkable and, above all, hard work, highly appreciated by the Academy.
Sacrifice for art
If Larraín explained that Spencer It was a film he made for his mother, on that occasion his interest arose when he saw that there are not many films about opera, while he considers it to be an “incredible art”. That is why he decided to close his trilogy with this Callas, which, according to him, would be unthinkable without the actress who gave him life. “This film could not exist without Angelina”, he assured, defining his proposal not as a drama, but as “a celebration of her life, her art and her music”. Jolie returned the praise and assured that her only concern was “to live up to the fans of Maria Callas and opera, the fear was to disappoint them”.
The actress believes that the world was “very cruel” to Callas and that she does not know if, when she died, she was aware of how much she was loved. “I think she died alone and in a lot of pain,” said the actress, something also shared by her film partner, Pierfrancesco Favino, who left a reflection on the opera singer, someone who “suffered and sacrificed herself so that the world could enjoy” her gift.
A diva does not exist without excellence in what she does. You have to be the best first and then move on. There is no diva without greatness
Pablo Larrain
— Director
Its structure in the acts and its musical impulses make Jolie believe that Married It sounds a lot like one of the operas her character performed in, and for Larraín his assessment is correct: “She’s right, she also has a tragic sense of life. Most of the songs she sings are tragedies. 90% of what she sings ends with her death on stage, and there’s something we talked about a lot when writing the script, and that’s how we created a character who was ultimately the sum of the tragedies she sang. It had to be achieved from a celebratory perspective and not from a tragic perspective. “It’s a film about a woman who has spent her life singing for others, worrying about others, about her relationships, but who is now ready to face her destiny and take control of her life.”
Married led Angelina Jolie to rethink the definition of a diva, who “normally tends to have a negative state.” “I relearned the meaning of the word thanks to him and I have a new relationship with it,” Jolie said. Larraín also brought his new vision of the concept: “A diva does not exist without excellence in what she does. You have to be the best first and then move on. There is no diva without greatness. “Being a perfectionist, disciplined, tough… she would go to rehearsals and if someone missed a word, she would leave, and then they would say she was a diva, but she was just disciplined, because in opera, if you don’t have discipline, you can’t do anything,” he said. An attitude that appears in the film, which shows its protagonist oscillating between tender and selfish; between his affection for his servants and the obsessions and manias of a character who will remain a mystery after this film.
