Reviewed by James Karas
As the lights fade at the end of Maria, during the endless credits we hear “Va Pensiero”, the great chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco. It is a riveting vocal piece that rose to national status during the unification of Italy in the 19th century. In a film about a great soprano, it is the longest operatic piece that we hear and of course it has nothing to do with Maria Callas.
The film begins in September 1977. Days before Callas’s death on September 16. We see the terrible end of a great singer during those days but there are of necessity numerous flashbacks in Callas’s life from her stay in Greece before and during World War II and her years of struggle and triumph in opera houses around the world. We also see her astounding failures when her voice declined and get a glimpse of her husband Giovanni Meneghini (Alessandro Bressanello). More attention is paid to her affair and deep love for billionaire Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and her two faithful servants Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher).
Photo by Pablo Larraín/Netflix - © 2024 Netflix, Inc.
All of that could have added up to a significant, informative and enjoyable film. It does not. Maria appears disjointed, confusing and in the end boring. We frequently have no idea where we are. The Eiffel Tower is a dead giveaway for Paris but the shots inside opera house provide almost no help. Are we in Mexico City, Venice, London, New York? We could be but we get very little help at times in recognizing the location and I found that annoying,
We know that Callas started building her career in Athens during World War II and she is shown in the film singing for two Nazi officers with her sister. We then see a plump girl sitting on a bed in a small room starting to undress herself. “Not now” says the nazi officer and asks her to sing. She sings the Habanera from Carmen a cappella, not one of her signature roles, with the obvious suggestion that she was prostituting herself. There is no evidence that she ever did that, but director Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight have decided to follow one of the rumours that circulated about her after the war.
We go from flashbacks in black and white to triumphal performances and epic ovations and witness her affair with Onassis, the loss of her voice and the ebb of her her life in the last days before her death. The action is framed in the appearance of Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) a handsome reporter with a cameraman to record the life of La Divina. She is tempestuous, irrational, a star, a diva, and we see all those characteristics. And are given a snap character portrait of the supremely wealthy and equally crooked Onassis. She got pregnant by him but her body did not carry the baby to term. We are not sure what happened.
We do hear her singing some of the Mad Scene from Anna Bolena and a full version of “Vissi d’arte” from Turandot, one her greatest recordings. There are snippets of arias along the way and if you can recognize them, good for you, if you don’t tough luck. Jolie lip syncs where necessary but the voice is always Callas’s.
The making of Maria received considerable publicity because Jolie was to play the starring role. We see her expressive and beautiful face as Maria in the last days of her life. It is a moving portrait of a tragic end to a great career. Her successes are passed mostly in small pieces that give little impression of the great singer or the woman behind it. Jolie’s sheer appearance enlivens the film but not enough to save director Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight’s movie. It does not work even with a length of a little more than two hours. I ended up checking my watch. “Va Pensiero” is a wonderful chorus but it has nothing to do with the life or career of Maria Callas.
P.S. After writing my review and I read what some critics had to say and I was surprised to
find out that the scenes with the Reporter Mandrax were Maria’s delusions! The
clue is in the word Mandrax which was a drug that Maria was presumably taking whose
“dependency symptoms include irritability, sleeplessness, delerium tremens,
mania and epileptiform attacks” according to Dr. Michael Kelly of Dublin. I
knew nothing about the drug and had no idea that Larrain and Knight were filming
Maria’s delusions. It lowered my opinion of the film even further.
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Maria a film directed by Pablo Larrain and written
by Steven Knight was scheduled to be released on Netflix in December 2024.
James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture of The Greek Press.
