Angelina Jolie declaims an imperious performance as opera star Maria Callas in this strange, sad, mordantly witty film from screenwriter Steven Knight and director Pablo Larraín, showing her declining months in Paris in 1977; the lioness in winter succumbing with ecstatic defiance to illness and loneliness. Maria broods over her “medication” and neglects to eat, and she is impossibly difficult with the servants, housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and valet Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), who are the aghast witnesses to her decline – and she is beginning to relinquish the idea that she will ever sing again. The whole thing is interspersed with pharma-fuelled hallucination-flashbacks to the days of her celebrity pomp, but also further back to her traumatised girlhood in Nazi-occupied Greece.
This film has had a mixed, sometimes frosty reception; I can only say I found Jolie’s performance as luxurious as state-of-the-art fake fur, and there is an overt theatricality and artificiality which gives the film its life. Jolie’s own singing is digitally fused with lip-synced overdubs of Callas’s own recordings, while her non-singing performance is gorgeously haughty and self-aware, her eyes pathetically magnified to frog-like dimensions by the big glasses she wears for stalking about Paris, both demanding and resenting fan recognition. Her lips are always pursed in a very amusing moue of discontent, always about to deliver a curt putdown. And that voice – a theatrical refinement of the way Callas spoke in English, removing the American trace, but substituting an Anglicised nasal twang like a very subtle Katharine Hepburn with a hint of … yes … Gloria Swanson.
Jolie carries the potential for desolate comedy which makes this film so engrossing – unlike, I have to say, Zeffirelli’s reverential and syrupy 2002 film Callas Forever with Fanny Ardant, also set in 1977. Jolie’s Maria is addicted to Mandrax which causes extended delusions that she is talking to a TV interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who is in love with her, and it is to him that she confides stories about the great, toxic love of her life: Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). She enters her own trance at the memory of great performances at La Scala, the Met or Covent Garden, while bristling at the suggestion that her no-shows and cancellations were just tantrums which let the fans down. She gets Ferruccio to buy a tape recorder so she can compare her former and current self, like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
Perhaps oddly, this film doesn’t reference Callas’s one significant movie appearance, in Pasolini’s Medea in 1969, although Jolie must surely have studied Callas’s almost wordless performance there. There is a sensational confrontation over a restaurant table – she resents the presumption of John F Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) sitting down opposite her and making supercilious overtures on the basis that their respective spouses are secretly involved. And Valeria Golino is quietly furious as her acerbic sister Yakinthi, who confronts Maria about her self-indulgence and self-destruction at a Paris cafe.
The most poignant moments, but perhaps the most difficult to represent dramatically, come with Maria’s daily visit to a shrewd, supportive accompanist with whom she may be rehearsing a comeback, but these recitals merely expose how Callas’s voice has declined. These realist cracks and distortions are somehow less commanding onscreen than the simple discrepancy between her voice (and prestige) at its highest and her current depression and delusion.
Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana. There is less sentimentality and self-importance to this one though, for all that it is about the biggest diva in history. Swanson’s Norma Desmond found herself obsolete and forgotten in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, but in this film Callas’s case is far crueller: her stardom and prestige are as high as they ever were. She is still big and the opera didn’t get small.
But Callas cannot gratify the public demand for her presence. Her voice is gone. And everything that is now happening, the ailments, the delusions, the outbursts, are all death-wish symptoms, indicative of her wrenching need to conclude this futile, painful endgame. It’s an aria of self-effacement.
• Maria is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10 January.
