María Callas appears, surprises with her delicate and fragile purity, and dies. That is Larraín's proposal: to start right at the end or, more accurately, to coincide the beginning with the fall of the curtain. The entire film, in fact, is immersed in a colossal, baroque, and therefore pure fatality. Pasolini, who made her film debut (her only film) in Medea, dedicated a poem to her that said: Bringing with you that smell of the grave,/ you sing arias composed by Verdi that have turned as red as blood/ and the experience of it (without uttering a single word)/ teaches sweetness, pure sweetness.
María Callas, the film with which Pablo Larraín closes his tragic trilogy of tragic women from the very tragic 20th century, consciously or not, lives in the spirit of the Roman's verses. As the director himself commented at the film's presentation in Venice, María Callas spent her entire life singing operas where she inevitably died on stage. One could say that so much drama represented on stage had to inevitably bleed onto the skin of real life. This is how her biographies always recount the abysses that the diva brought forth in her wake. Let's say that Larraín's effort, in part, consists of distancing himself as much as possible from that shared darkness, and to a certain extent obvious, to approach another place not brighter, but warmer, more inhabitable, more, as Pasolini would say, sweet, pure sweetness.
María Callas continues the journey of the two previous works, of which, in its own way, this is a replica, but much more intense. And that is appealing and, at times, exciting. Opera provokes that effect: it transports everyday life to a stage so exaggeratedly unreal, so provocatively false, so schematic and even ridiculous, that there is no choice but to surrender. Suddenly, everything makes sense and life finally manages to be something worthy in its glitters and false ornaments, in its exaggerated gestures and infinite passion. But beyond the hypnotic hyperboles of the genre, the structure of the entire trilogy remains the same. What changes, and for the worse, is the pitch at which the story progresses.
María Callas feels frustratingly static. Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight (the same as Spencer) reconstruct the last days of the diva secluded in her Paris home. From there, the script draws lines to the past, but always careful not to stumble into the clumsiness of the biographical narrative, of the typical biopic. The photography work by Edward Lachman in his treatment of textures and the very soul of time and certain images elevated to the status of a totem is dazzling. Furthermore, the specific facts are not as important as the emotion of the moment. In a delicate and refined performance, Angelina Jolie - who since 2008, with Changeling, had not taken on a role that was not foolish - blends her natural and untrained singing voice with the historical recordings of the diva. And there, the film indulges repeatedly with a reverence that is not so much excessive as it is merely repetitive. In fact, Maria lingers on her own sound discovery, let's call it that, and, to the despair of almost everyone, she stays there to live.
Nevertheless, vulnerability remains the argument. As in Jackie (2016), the protagonist wanders through grief and lost in the labyrinth of life, suddenly disoriented. Kennedy's widow has just survived her husband's assassination, while Callas tries to stand tall amidst the shipwreck of a voice that evaporates, of a husband who is no longer there, and of a fame that is only ashes of the past. As in Spencer (2021), our heroine lives secluded in the face of a world that does not understand her, that has abandoned her. In solitude, Diana decided to leave her husband and prince to try to be someone else. Callas, in a balanced correspondence, now strives to rebuild herself from within to try to be someone who, without her gift, can no longer continue to be. Now, as it has been said, everything is more intense. Good. Now, as it has been said, the narrative refuses to move from its place. Bad.
Onassis, the partner who abandoned her for the previous Jackie, said that at the end of her life, her talent was like "a bird that had died in her throat." And Pasolini replied to him saying that she, in truth, was always "a little bird with the powerful voice of an eagle; a trembling eagle." Sweetness, pure sweetness.
Director: Pablo Larraín. Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee. Duration: 123 minutes. Nationality: Spain.