★★
Pablo Larraín is back, with comfortably the worst film of his career.
Billed as the completing part of his isolated women biopic trilogy (Portman as Jackie Kennedy! Stewart as Lady Diana!) here he brings us Angelia Jolie as Maria Callas, and then proceeds to make every wrong turn possible.
Right from the start the film is directorially busy, cutting back and forth between back and white and colour, dropping into 16mm, and having clapboards come into shot to announce Act changes. None of this adds much to the story, and all of it feels slightly desperate.
The main issue though is Stephen Knight’s script, which starts with a dead Callas being wheeled out of her palatial apartment in 1977 Paris, jumps slightly back in time, and then has her hallucinate her way through a series of encounters with non-existent people – primarily a British film crew – through which she can verbalise in blunt and superficial terms her emotional landscape. Nothing is left implicit here. She decides she’s in the mood for adulation, so she announces she’s in the mood for adulation. She goes to a restaurant and is accosted by a fan. Shall the waiter move her inside? No, she tells him, she’s not here for food – she’s here for adulation! This is very useful if you happen to have gone to the bathroom the first time she said it.
The British documentarian that follows her around is called Mandrax, named after her primary medication, a form of hypnotic sedative also known as Quaaludes. I shall walk with Mandrax through the streets of Paris! she announces two or three times, which must have seemed clever on the page.
The script loses interest in the film crew after a while, and they don’t crop up much in the later parts of the film. Her valet, played by Pierfrancesco Favino, and to a lesser extent her housemaid, played by Alba Rohrwacher, get more time, and prove by far the most interesting characters in the movie. I’d have much preferred to see the whole thing through their eyes, running around trying to hide Callas’s secret stashes of psychiatric medication.
Meanwhile, Callas continues to wander around Paris though, talking to her favourite barman, and to the singing coach she’s interested in helping her to get back her lost voice. If you buy a record of Blackbirds singing, she tells them, it’s simply marked “Blackbird Song.” She infers there must be a “Human Song” and that she will sing it. What she means by this is unclear, although she does sing at the end of the movie before dropping dead, so perhaps that was it. (No spoiler – after all, we started here). Afterwards her dogs come in a whimper over her corpse, and Larraín seems to helpfully mix some of Callas’s vocals into their sobs, so it appears they are singing an aria to their fallen mistress. A Canine Song, perhaps.
As for the singing – it’s strong, obviously, and they do a variable but mostly ok job of matching Jolie’s lips to the vocals. Otherwise, Jolie’s performance is stiffly imperious and occasionally maudlin. Despite the clear intent to get under her skin, the film fails and we are left with an idea of Callas but not the soul. When she is wooed away from her husband by Aristotle Onassis, in flashback, we never get a sense of romance or desire. And when he is dying, Callas must leave his bedside as Jackie Kennedy arrives. If you guessed the script would pointedly emphasise that she left by the back door, by having her tell that to the film crew she hallucinates, then also tell them this meant she was still considered a secret, then you’ve got the measure of this film.
Turgid, arch, superficial and ridiculous, this fails even on the level of camp. Time for Larraín to pick a new tune.
Maria premiered today at the Venice Film Festival, ahead of a release on Netflix later this year.
Whitlock&Pope 