The divine, the absolute diva, a singer who was all the heroines she played and who embodied the spirit of opera music, all of it. Maria Callas was opera itself in the years she graced the stage and Pablo Larrain wants to reiterate this by recounting the last week of the life of the most famous and beloved singer of all time. “Maria” – simply – is the title of the film by the Chilean director that opened the Competition of the 81st Venice Film Festival, an anti-biography that (after “Jackie” and “Spencer”) also closes a sort of trilogy that the director dedicated to “tragic” female figures of the twentieth century. Angelina Jolie transforms into a sad and sorrowful Maria Callas, in her last days in Paris, in September 1977, shortly before her death at only 53 years of age, when her career had already come to an abrupt end, between illnesses, a weakened body and a tormented love life.
Maria was Violetta, Tosca, she was Madama Butterfly, she didn’t “just” interpret them, says Larrain, editing some archive footage with the audience’s applause to reconstructions in which the actress plays the role of Maria. She was the operas she sang, there are recordings to prove it: “too perfect, therefore wrong, because opera should be sung differently each time”. In her last days in Paris, with only the faithful servants (played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher) she imagines writing an autobiography, while she tries with a teacher to measure her voice, imagining who knows how a desperate return to the stage. The imagined and imaginary figure of a journalist who collects her stories acts as a common thread to the narration that proceeds by acts (just like an opera) and follows the rise and fall of the divine. The meeting with Onassis, the great love that did not marry her, the stages, and further back her childhood in Greece and in the present the drugs, the ghosts of the past that haunted her. Larrain shows a boundless love for this tragic figure that he treats with respect and almost devotion, editing a film that moves and enthralls, aided – naturally – by the real voice of Callas that accompanies the images (in the close-ups of the “present” it is Angelina Jolie herself who sings). The editing of the songs, their choice, makes the connection between the performer and the works evident, makes visible the ghosts of a past that returned to torment “Callas”, as she was called by everyone, a character who had surpassed Maria and who had transformed herself into the protagonist of a tragedy: “Greek, very human and sad”.