Maria, starring Angelina Jolie is the third film about famous women from award-winning Chilean director Pablo Larrain. It follows Jackie made in 2016 (Jackie Kennedy), and Spencer (Princess Diana) in 2021.
Maria is Maria Callas – arguably the greatest opera singer of all time, and the setting is in her lavish Paris apartment seven days before her death in 1977 at the age of 53.  Frail and lonely, she hasn’t sung in public for over four years – but wants to relive her former glory.
She is eating very little, self-medicating and hallucinating under the influence of the (now banned) hypnotic drug Mandrax which she hides from her doctor and devoted butler (Pierfrancesco Favio) and maid (Alba Rohnwacher).
In her imagination she believes she is being interviewed by a reporter called Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) for a documentary. They walk the streets of Paris together as she recalls her teenage life singing for German soldiers, and leaving her husband for a long-term affair with Greek magnate Aristotle Onassis.
It is a great role for Jolie who is convincing as the Greek diva. She spent seven months training to sing opera and her lip-syncing is spot on. Ninety to 95% of the music is from original recordings of Callas- and it is only at the end of her life that the original recording is multi-tracked with her voice.
There are black and white flashbacks of Maria’s life on stage between the 1950s and 1960s and plenty of the music of Bellini, Puccini and Donizetti. The settings and costumes are gorgeous, but the unstructured narrative of the film makes it unclear about what is imagined and what is reality.
I don’t think this is the story many of us were expecting.
124 minutes.
Showing at Windsor Nedlands and Luna SX Fremantle.
Watch the trailer…