The best bit of this biopic of Maria Callas (1923-77) is at the end: the last few minutes of the 124-minute film.
Over the credits, you watch real home movie footage of Maria Callas, sailing on her lover Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Even without audio, you can see, thanks to her diva vamping and fixed stare with those huge eyes, what a wonder she was. A genius with a monstrous ego.
This is the third and last film in director Pablo Larraín's "Lady with Heels" trilogy, after Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). With all three compelling women, you long for real documentary rather than fabricated drama.
Still, Angelina Jolie has worked her socks off to get Callas right in her last doomed week in Paris. With Onassis dead, and her voice shot to pieces, Callas’s only consolations were her butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri (Pierfrancesco Favino, a study in deferential adoration of a mistress), her housekeeper, Bruna Lupoli (a touching Alba Rohrwacher), and her trusty bottles of Mandrax.
Jolie gets Callas’s spoken voice right. And she can’t help that she is even better-looking than Callas and even thinner. In 1954, the pudgy Callas lost 80 pounds – increasing her beauty but, some say, destroying her voice. Others say she had dermatomyositis, a connective tissue disease that cruelly attacked her larynx.
In what initially smacked of Callas-like egomania, Jolie refused to be dubbed and does lots of singing herself. In fact, for the youthful scenes where Callas was at her finest, 90 per cent of the recordings are of Callas’s voice. Jolie sensibly does more singing in the last scenes, where Callas’s voice had become patchy.
It's a clever idea, too, by writer Steven Knight to root the film in Callas’s last tragic week. At its best, her voice was the soft, sweet sound of melancholic suffering. And Callas’s life was full of suffering: the horrible, pushy mother of her New York youth; her desperately poor years in Athens during the war; her failed 10-year marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a rich, older industrialist; and her appalling treatment by Onassis, who split up from her and married Jackie Kennedy. There are rumours of a lost baby with Onassis, too.
So the tragedy of her life chimes with the heart-breaking sadness of her arias – which are, all too briefly, cut into the film to illustrate the youthful highlights of her career.
But, if you’re going to have a film about one of the world’s best singers, why cut some of her songs short? At one moment, Jolie’s aged Callas declares, ‘I can’t listen to my own records,’ and the music is cut. She may not want to listen to the recordings of her youth – we do.
Still, when you do get to hear Callas sing – rather than Jolie – you are immediately enraptured by that instantly recognisable voice, paradoxically improved by its imperfections.
The settings, too, are well-chosen, from La Scala to the Hungarian State Opera House in Budapest. The Hungarian capital is cropping up more and more on screen – it was used in the new adaptation of The Day of the Jackal. You get Western European-looking magnificence on an Eastern European budget.
The script has its good moments, not least in capturing Callas’s magnificently spoilt side. She asks to be taken to a restaurant where the waiters know who she is because, she says, ‘I’m in the mood for adulation.’ At one point, her accompanist calms her wounded ego, saying, ‘You’re not late. Everyone else is early.’
But, in the end, it isn’t clear exactly who this film is aimed at. Opera aficionados will mind Jolie singing instead of Callas. People who don’t like opera just won’t be very interested in her – there just isn’t quite enough drama beyond the Great Singer Loses Her Voice storyline.
