On the first day of the Venice competition, Thursday 29 August, two films came out of their boxes and galloped. On the one hand, the overly conventional MariaDrama about the last days of the singer Maria Callas (1923-1977), by Chilean Pablo Larraín, a regular at major festivals and biopics – Maria It is the fifth, after Neruda (2016), Jackie (2016), spencer (2021), about Lady Di, and The Count (2023), about the dictator Pinochet. On the other hand, the sensual and bizarre The Jockeyby Argentine Luis Ortega, born in 1980, known above all for the angel (2019), presented at Cannes in Un Certain Regard. The Jockey It tells the story of the reinvention of a man, a jockey (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) exploited by a small gang of thugs, who then finds unsuspected strengths to change his destiny, like an overfed Kaurismakian hero.
In Maria, Angelina Jolie is able to move people, her features are very different from those of the Primadonna, she does not try to imitate her, but rather works on her presence and her unfathomable melancholy. The singer is desperate for not finding her voice anymore and cannot recover from her anguish: the rich Onassis left with Jackie Kennedy, whom she married. Even so, the polished staging of this depression sometimes borders on elegant images, such as this low-angle shot of Angelina Jolie, collapsed amidst her countless handbags…
The camera initially stays away from the supporting characters, as if to spare their effects. Alba Rohrwacher plays the attentive cook, Pierfrancesco Favino the devoted butler and Vincent Macaigne the concerned doctor.
A dusty veil
Callas’s last week before she was found dead in her living room unfolds in several acts, between the splendour of her Parisian home and her outdoor encounters, rehearsals with a pianist, interviews with a journalist (the delicate Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee). The main stumbling block of the film was the singing: how to revive the diva’s voice? Should Angelina Jolie sing or not?
Pablo Larraín gets away with it with more or less skill, blurring the lines, choosing to constantly mix in archive images (Callas seen from a distance, singing on stage) and the film rushes along, falsely aged, as if covered by a dusty veil, which is not the best effect. Within the same sequence, we go from an excerpt from an old concert to a filmed scene in which the American actress relives memories or has visions with the help of her pills. The gamble paid off. Angelina Jolie, who took singing lessons for the role, can thus enhance her voice without fear of ridicule, as she embodies a defeated singer, who has lost her prodigious vocal flights.
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