Rent Maria (2024)

Death spiral drama about the soprano Maria Callas - Maria review by PD

Pablo Larraín’s drama about the legendary American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, begins on the day of her death in 1977 and then flashes back to one week before; most of it taking place during that week and dotted with key episodes from Callas’s life. The story it tells is that of a neurotic death spiral.

Callas' apartment, with its chandeliers hanging from high ceilings, its wooden walls and large old canvases, as well as one of the most luxurious beds I’ve ever seen in a film, is splendid enough to suggest the court of an 18th-century French royal. This is Larraín’s third inside portrait of an iconic female figure of the 20th century after “Jackie” and “Spencer”. In all three, the residences loom with significance, like elaborate stage sets that act as gilded cages, though here Callas' apartment, more than the houses in the other films, feels like a prison of her own making, and maybe that’s because her whole life has become a prison. Maria gets through the days by taking her 'medicine,' a cocktail of uppers and downers, notably Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative that she obtains illegally; meanwhile, she treats the two people who’ve taken care of her for years — housekeeper, Bruna and her butler / chauffeur, Feruccio — like vassals whose purpose in life it to cater to her various whims. She avoids meeting her doctor as if he were the devil, whilst she fantasises, night after night, that she’s being visited by the ghost of her former lover, Aristotle Onassis.

And then there’s the matter of her voice. Maria is 53, and she hasn’t sung in public for four-and-a-half years. Yet the way the film presents her, she’s a total artist, a woman fuelled and consumed by her gift, which is to sing opera with a voice so sublime, so pure in its piercing majesty, that it reaches to the heavens. The film is filled with opera, notably by the great 19th-century Italian composers, who Callas elevated in the repertoire, and every time an aria comes on the soundtrack we’re indeed swept up by the power of her gift, Jolie doing an extraordinary job of lip-syncing to the nuances of Callas’s vocal splendour.

Jolie gives in many ways a very fine performance - from the moment she appears, she seizes our attention, playing Maria as woman of wiles who is imperious and mysterious. However, the essential vulnerability in the end-of-her-tether Maria is somewhat lacking, whilst the black-and-white flashbacks tend to serve us with as many questions as answers, leaving us with the distinct sense that we haven't delved very far into what in real life was certainly a terribly complex individual. Nevertheless, Larraín’s film is unusually nuanced in its double-edged depiction of the relationship between icons and their public, and Callas — even while losing her grip on reality — is all too clear-eyed about what people want from her. As she says of her dogs: their dedication is 99 percent motivated by food, and one percent by love; this dynamic puts her at a distance from the rest of the world: the same distance that separates a theatre audience from the stage. Well worth a look/listen.

Great lead Performance - Dullish Story - Maria review by GI

Director Pablo Larrain's biopic of the last days of opera diva Maria Callas is his third in a loose trilogy of biopics of famous women, following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). With Maria he has directed what is a rather strange film with a committed performance from Angelina Jolie in the title role. The narrative follows Callas in her last days in Paris in the 1970s, addicted to the hallucinogenic sedative Mandrax, trying to recover her declining voice and possibly wanting to make a comeback; all the while she hallucinates the drug is a journalist (Kochi Smit-McPhee) to whom she shares her past sadnesses and regrets. At times the film is rather laborious and whilst Jolie is rather good with her facial subtleties and calm put downs of fans who approach her it's the overall story of the woman's failing health and inability to take the advice from her faithful retainers and doctor that is all a bit aimless. The film has a sort of over theatricality to it that reminded me of the expressive performances of the past such as Gloria Swanson. Jolie's commanding performance is worth your time with this film and of course the music is superb as most is actual Callas recordings so you get to hear just how good she was in her heyday.