MARIA
Director: Pablo Larraín
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino, Kodi Smit-McPhee
Rating: (M) ★★★+
REVIEWED BY JEREMY QUINN
As with Pablo Larrain’s excellent 2016 film Jackie - which rather than being a traditional Wikipedia-entry-as-biopic was an impressionistic art piece focused on the period of Jackie Kennedy’s life immediately after the death of her husband - his spiritual sequel Maria (Rialto), about the Greek-American opera singer Maria Callas, ignores the standard biographical beats you might expect.
Set in the week leading up to her death in 1977, Larrain follows Callas as she spends time in her lush, beautifully decorated Parisian apartment - singing for her maid in the mornings, visiting a theatre in the afternoons, and sitting in bars and cafes where she hopes to run into still-adoring members of the public - all the while aware her days of performing are well behind her.
She’s also addicted to Quaaludes, and therefore she imagines, or hallucinates, talking to a TV interviewer who asks her to elaborate on the most memorable times in her life.
It’s a useful device to add some background and context to her story, and we see through flashbacks the events she considers meaningful, although these are never the rousing, crowd-pleasing movie moments, but always the quiet bits before and after.
Angelina Jolie’s performance is what makes this such a compelling watch, as she fully embodies the idea of the artist as insecure diva, playing Maria as someone who not only seems unsure as to why she was bestowed such a great talent in the first place, but even more so as to why it was so cruelly taken away.
