There is no doubt that Chilean director Pablo Larraín is the master of biopics. By developing his own formula, he specialised in depicting pragmatic figures of the 20th century, mostly female, showing only a glimpse in their life, a few days that are enough to encapsulate their essence in a condensed amount of time. In other words, not the Wikipedia page treatment that most other biographical pictures tend to follow. Last year he brought to the Lido El Conde, portraying Augusto Pinochet as a vampire. This time, in a return to form, he’s dealing with a ghost. Maria Callas, in her personal third act, lives with the spectre of her past, having lost her voice but not her ego. And if in Spencer (2021) Lady Diana was striving for privacy, here Larraìn reverses the situation, with Callas chasing the spotlight instead.
Intimate and yet never accessible, close but not too close, La Callas wanders around the streets of Paris accompanied by her disillusions, reminiscing of Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. But the Diva’s lost voice still echoes in her present, cutting to operatic flashbacks that remind of Forman’s Amadeus, where the now mythological Callas becomes her own Salieri. Conscious of her withering, she has not performed in over four years, and her only companions are her butler and maid with whom she shares a tender familiarity; but “there is no life away from the stage” for Maria Callas. Morphing into La Traviata’s Violetta, Maria is as moving as the great tragedies Callas played at La Scala.
Elegantly shot on film, mesmerising compositions alternate with zesty dialogues written by Steven Knight, particularly with her charismatic lover, Aristotele Onassis. Angelina Jolie delivers a career defining performance, fragile in her everlasting strength and irresistible eccentricity. Her lips alone, vibrating for each aria, deserve an oscar nomination.
Larrain is in perfect tune.
4/5
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