'Maria' review: Jolie's Callas is a cold, one-note bore

María Callas rose to fame as the voice of Tosca, Medea and Carmen, the eternally damned opera heroines. If the opera still attracts audiences a century from now, perhaps it will sing about Callas, a fighter who survived the Nazi occupation of Greece, a boo at La Scala, a media hazing on multiple continents, and a humiliating public affair that only was hindered by her. own tools to cope with the situation: sedatives and hunger.

“Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie, is director Pablo Larraín's latest effort to build his own canon of 20th century tragedies. His previous melodramas “Jackie” and “Spencer” were fables about two painfully self-conscious celebrities at their lowest points: Larraín peeked behind the facades of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana less to humanize them than to expose their wounds. Callas, however, was famous for her attacks, so Larraín, perversely and disappointingly, chooses to respect her imperious veneer. If she's the big boss-level diva he's been working with, Larraín lets her win.

This is Callas at the end of her life. His corpse is the first thing we see on screen, although cinematographer Edward Lachman has such a dazzling trick of inserting chandeliers into the frame that it takes a minute to spot his body. In the flashbacks that follow, Callas grandly tries to dismiss liver disease as spoiled wine. She spends most of the film high on Quaaludes, which in 1970s Paris were sold under the Mandrax brand. Screenwriter Steven Knight even walks her around with an imaginary character named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a television reporter whom he has made hallucinate to feel important. Mandrax throws out his softball questions. She crushes them.

If you've seen old interviews with Callas, you know that real journalists tended to be rude to her. First, they would ask Callas if she was a monster. They would then tease her about spending nine years with Aristotle Onassis only to be dumped by the future Jackie O. They needed to poke the goddess to see if she would bleed.

From the beginning, Callas dodged these inquisitions with humor. Accused of throwing a bottle of brandy at a director, she responded: “I wish I had done that. “It would be a shame for the bottle.” However, as Callas grew older, she became more rigid, and that's the version we're seeing here. Regal, cautious and stubborn, Jolie plays Callas as a fifty-something loner who rejects love, fame, joy and music and doesn't want to fight. that difficult to recover them. His character arc is just a blueprint of one; From scene to scene, you're never sure if she's going to act. Callas wants to be adored but she doesn't want to be known. Her exhausted housekeepers Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) say a lot with each silent, fearful glance, and when they get too personal with her, Callas orders them to move the piano as punishment.

Larraín makes a half-hearted attempt to recast Callas as a feminist martyr, claiming, in the most roundabout way possible, that she was once forced to sell her body to soldiers for cash and food. Biographical points are unapologetically omitted, including her marriage to a man who doesn't even deserve a name before being abandoned by Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). To add to the disorientation, young Callas (Aggelina Papadopoulou) looks nothing like Jolie: not her lips, not her eyes, not her nose, not her jaw, not her complexion, not anything. However, the casting choice highlights how Callas recast herself in the 1950s, losing a third of her body mass to transform from a zaftig soprano cliché to a haute couture sylph (and in the process, sacrificing a little of his drive).

Callas could wrap herself in a cape and force the audience to focus on her. Its stillness was magnetic. All the emotions flooded his eyes and his throat. Jolie trained in opera for seven months to prepare for the role and, according to Larraín, sang herself on set. What we are hearing is his voice mixed with the real one in concentrations ranging from 1% to 70%; the latter, I suppose, in the scenes in which a retired Callas tests her own vocal strength. To my ears, Jolie sounds fantastic, the kind of voice that would knock your socks off at karaoke night. But Callas Peak hits the senses like lightning. Larraín attempts to capture that power in his close-up of Jolie, bare-shouldered, singing to the camera in bold black and white. But the rawness of the shot works against it, giving us too much time to notice that Jolie's throat barely seems to move, to wonder if her eyes shouldn't have more passion.

Burning passion used to be the only thing that characterized Jolie. You could close your eyes right now and see the wicked smile that made her a star in 1999's “Girl, Interrupted.” But having endured her own tabloid scrutiny, she, too, has proven too controlled. Here, there's just one second in a montage when, during a performance of Medea, Jolie unleashes a glare. The moment is so electric that you wish the entire movie had that juice. We don't see Callas as vibrant again until the end credits, and then it's stock footage of the real person flashing a mischievous grin.

“A song should never be perfect,” Callas insists. I agree. Some critics called her ugly singing. Not in the factual sense, because that would be crazy, but closer to how fashion lovers know how to add a discordant accessory. The clash keeps things interesting. Jolie, however, wears perfection as armor, so no matter how much her Callas insists that opera is intoxicating, no matter how intoxicated her character really is. ishis performance is a sober vision of madness.

Larraín allows himself the occasional visual thrill, say, a crowd of Parisians suddenly gathering in a chorus. Otherwise, we're so caught up in Callas's delusions that things seem flat. “What is real and what is not real is my business,” he pronounces, after having subjected the world to his will.

Oddly enough, after swooning over giant aria after giant aria, I left the theater obsessed with one of Larraín's smaller sound design choices. It comes when Callas, resplendent even in her bathrobe, slips into the kitchen to sing to Bruna while the poor thing makes her an omelet. The solo goes on forever, long enough to make clear that, yes, Callas had fans clamoring outside the Metropolitan Opera, but she could also be a little boring. And then, halfway through the song, Larraín adds a little clang (the sound of the spatula hitting the pan) to let us know that even in the prima donna's fiercely protected bubble, her ego doesn't always trump a plate of eggs. .

I wish Larraín had reduced Callas to one size larger. He is too protective of his fellow artist to wallow in the fury that fueled his art. Callas could sing three octaves, but the film is mostly one note.