The Callas biopic “Maria”, the latest in a trilogy directed by Pablo Larrain, could well win Angelina Jolie her second Best Actress Oscar. While the film has divided international critics, Jolie’s performance has won unanimous acclaim…
Angelina Joliereceived an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival this summer for her title role in “Maria”. The film made its world premiere there.
Perhaps not as much as the 13 minutes reserved for Callas’ farewell at her final concert in Montreal on May 13, 1974, in front of 3,000 people…
Pablo Larrain’s last biopic
Still, it’s a fine indication of the success of Angelina Jolie’s interpretation of the most famous of singers in Pablo Larraín’s latest film. More controversial than the American star’s reincarnation of Maria Callas, however, wasits direction.
This is the last film in the American-Argentinian director’s trilogy devoted to famous women, all struck by tragic fate.
Each time, Pablo Larrain chooses the climax of these lives to build his biopics.
Released in 2016, “Jackie”recounted the days following the assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963 of Jacqueline Bouvier, aka Jackie, her celebrated husband and 35th President of the United States, John Kennedy.
Released in 2021, “Spencer” focused on Lady Di’s personal crisis during the 1991 Christmas festivities, when she began to think about separating from her royal husband.
A tragic end to life
And finally, “Maria” chose the bleak years of Callas’s later life, reclusive in her Paris apartment, having lost her vocal abilities. In 1977, at the age of 53, she died of a heart attack. This period contrasts poignantly with the luminous voice and career of the Greek-American singer, born in New York in 1923.
Flashbacks to Callas’s past loves and triumphs reinforce the pathetic tone.
The dramatic spring of Pablo Larrain’s three biopics already guaranteed success with the general public, who are always attracted by unhappy icons (who reassure them that, after all, beautiful, rich and famous women have no right to happiness, and that a cushy existence is better…).
But the director has intensified the martingale of success by casting his heroines in the roles of well-known actresses.
American Kristen Stewart, Lady Di‘s cinematic avatar, already had a successful career under her belt: her first role at the age of 12 in David Fincher’s thriller Panic Room, which won her a BAFTA Rising Star in 2010, followed by a role in the Twilight saga, one of the most profitable franchises in cinema history, and numerous roles in big-budget independent productions such as Sils Maria by French director Olivier Assayas in 2014. Thanks to which she won the César for Best Supporting Actress.
Her role in “Spencer” earned her Oscar and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress.
Recognized stars
And there’s no need to introduce Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman, who played “Jackie”. She has already garnered numerous awards for her career, including theOscar for Best Actress in 2011 for her role in “Black Swan”.
Finally, by casting Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, Pablo Larrain has taken things up a notch, with the actress enjoying the same aura of worldwide superstardom as Callas had in the world of opera.
Known, like the singer, as much for her talent as for her private life (and her resounding divorce from Brad Pitt), the 49-year-old actress embodied it with great accuracy. Like Callas, forsaken by Greek billionaire Onassis for… Jackie Kennedy, Angelina Jolie has experienced the mid-life pangs of a disappointing, high-profile love affair.
In a press conference, she confessed that she shared the diva’s vulnerability…
The role of a lifetime
In the opinion of many, Angelina Jolie, “truly inhabited”, has found the role (if not the man…) of her life.
“Angelina Jolie’s largely theatrical but delicately untied performance seems both immersive and revelatory, as if Maria Callas were allowing her to reclaim her own identity as an artist and a human being”, praised the specialist website IndieWire.
Many critics were struck by the resemblance between the American actress and the haughty Greek opera singer, metamorphosed into an icon of elegance after her mysterious diet. Make-up – cat eyes highlighted with eyeliner and prominent cheekbones – mega-glasses, ultra-elegant outfits and polished images, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, helped to perfect the illusion.
To complete her immersion in the soul of Callas, Angelina Jolie didn’t hesitate to take singing lessons and work intensively for six months on her regal posture and accent.
Highly motivated
It’s true that she was highly motivated by the role. At the end of 2022, the actress had declared in a press release that she would “give” everything she could “to take up the challenge”. “Pablo Larraín is a director I’ve admired for a long time. To have the chance to tell Maria’s story with him, on a screenplay by Steven Knight (who had already written the screenplay for Jackie, ed. note), is a dream.”
Having already won the Best Actress Oscar in 2000 for James Mangold’s “A Stolen Life”, Angelina Jolie is now one of the favourites for this award at the forthcoming 2025 Oscars.
Joining Jolie on the biopic poster are Italian actress Valeria Golino, playing Jackie Kennedy, and actors Pierfrancesco Favino (Last Night in Milan), Alba Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), Haluk Bilginer (Winter Sleep) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog).
Released on Netflix on October 28 in the U.S., “Maria” will be released theatrically in France from February 5.
Whether you’re a fan of opera, Maria Callas, Angelina Jolie or all three, the film is a must-see. Everyone will be able to decide between the opinion of Le Figaro, which saw it as “an agreed-upon film that rings false”, and The Guardian, which hailed it as “a successful drama capable of sweeping viewers off their feet”.
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Featured Photo: © Netflix
