MARIA***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 10

Pablo Larrain's MARIA is a stunning film about iconic opera singer Maria Callas featuring a central performance by Angelina Jolie of such fragility and bravery that it destroyed me. It's a cinematic achievement at least on par with Larrain's Jackie Kennedy biopic, and arguably surpasses it. Every aspect is perfection.

The film focuses on the final week of Callas' life, sequestered in a grand Parisian apartment with her faithful housekeeper and butler (Alba Rohrwacher - HUNGRY HEARTS and Pierfrancesco Favino - WORLD WAR Z). Callas is dying of liver failure, ligament failure and is addicted to a variety of drugs.  Illness, dramatic weight loss, over-singing in her youth - whatever the reason - her voice has also failed her.  Publicly she claims that she will never perform again, but she is secretly rehearsing, with pitiful results. Added to the loss of her voice, we also know that she is suffering from heartbreak. Her big sister (Valerie Golina - PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE - in a deeply moving cameo) tells Maria to look forward but this entire film is of a woman trapped in her past.  Her mother pimped her out as a singer in Nazi occupied Athens and maybe more. Her first husband robbed her blind (though this is not shown here).  Her beloved Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer - The Turkish Detective) stopped her from singing, maybe made her have a forced abortion, and then left her for Jackie Kennedy.  Only her paid employees show her any love or concern for her health.

Robbed of love and health and finally her voice, Maria retreats into a drug-induced journey through her past.  Her drug Mandrax is personified by Kodi Smit-McPhee (Disclaimer) as a young interviewer. As befits a woman who has been a public persona her entire life, Maria chooses what to withhold, and what narrative to spin. She is deliberately enigmatic and mysterious. But this is a kind of defence mechanism and an act of desperation, and her spin is unsuccessful, not least in the way she discusses her maybe pregnancy.

Angelina Jolie is magnificent and fearless in this role.  Her final aria sung in a nightdress to an empty apartment (and a crowd outside, unknown to her) had me in tears. We believe in every ounce of lifelong heartbreak.  She is a diva and she is desperate. She is vulnerable and commanding all at once. Kudos to the technical team who found a way to blend Jolie's own singing with Callas' iconic recordings, particularly in her final week, where her voice is unsteady and uneven. I always believed that Angelina was singing, and this is no mean feat. We see her lips and vocal chords and body tremble and convey emotion.  It absolutely makes the film credible and moving.

Kudos also to cinematographer Ed Lachman (CAROL) for so beautifully capturing sunlit 1970s Paris, but also the crisp black and white flashbacks to Callas at her peak, and the grainy dreamed interviews with Mandrax.  This is a film whose technical brilliance is completely at the service of the narrative. And what a narrative.  Steven Knight - of Peaky Blinders fame - creates a script that in a short time gives us a lifetime of pain and hurt. And that uses music, always Callas' own music - to express her feelings and propel the narrative. For those of us who know these aria by heart, the lyrics, the knowledge of Callas' life, and Jolie's performance, blend into something transcendent.  

My only question is whether the film will work as well for those not familiar with Callas' work, given Pablo Larrain's refusal to give subtitles and translations of the opera. He explained before the screening that he tried to avoid surtitles when watching opera as a child and wanted to relate purely to the performance. I kind of agree, but feel this may be a barrier to some audience members.

MARIA has a running time of 124 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London 2024. It will have a limited theatrical release on November 27th and then will be released on Netflix on December 11th.

SPENCER*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 2

No film by Pablo Larrain can be a complete disaster. He's just too bloody talented. And his tale of Princess Diana's final Christmas inside the Royal Family is beautifully shot by DP Claire Mathon (PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE) in a manner reminiscent of Barry Lyndon - ethereal misty cool landscapes and warmly luscious interiors hiding a gothic horror. The framing is deliberate and intense - close-ups of Diana's quivering face - tracking shots that move with her in and out of rooms in which she is alienated and trapped -  tableaux held for longer than is comfortable.  Moreover, Larrain's film is scored by Jonny Greenwood (THERE WILL BE BLOOD) in glorious eclectic discordant cool jazz, classical piano and 80s pop kitsch, contributing to one of the most impressively intricate sound designs I've heard in years. 

In front of the lens, the supporting cast is strong throughout. I particularly loved Timothy Spall as a kind of austere Danvers-ish equerry who allows Larrain to show the full froideur of the institution, without actually having a go at Her Maj or Pricne Charles (Stella Gonet and Jack Farthing - used very sparingly indeed). And in the title role, this film hosts a career-best performance from Kristen Stewart, whose fragility and vulnerability is used to devastating effect. As a portrait of a woman suffering from a nervous breakdown, bulimia, suicidal ideation and paranoid delusion, it's a heartbreaking and powerful film.

But for me, as a film about Diana Spencer, this film is a failure.  And that is predominantly because of choices made by Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight (the pisspoor SERENITY).  I found their screenplay heavy-handed to the point of absurdity.  In an opening sequence, Diana is lost. Lost! "Where am I?" she asks bewildered peasants. Where is she indeed. "Do you think they will kill me?"  Whatever can you mean?! Throughout the film she has visions of Anne Boleyn. A cheap trick made even cheaper by a sequence where we see Diana in full tudor kit running through the house. And curiously miscast since Anne Boleyn was most famously the "other woman" rather than the "wronged woman" - in other words, more Camilla than Diana. And then the mawkish near final scene, where Diana's beloved dresser (Sally Hawkins - so talented she almost sells it) leaves her a note saying "it's not just me that loves you".  This film hangs heavy with portents of Diana's death and the mass hysteria that followed.

It's also odd to have Diana hanker after her childhood home as a safe place full of memories of dancing and laughter and sun-dappled gardens.  Diana had a notoriously miserable childhood, with a mother who abandoned her and a father who then remarried someone Diana painted as a wicked stepmother.  And far from being a boarded up gothic manor, the house was very much alive, being renovated by her stepmother in the bourgeois comfort that Diana claims to crave in this film, but decried in real life.

Finally, when contemplating this film compared to Larrain's magisterial JACKIE I wondered if the problem was simply that Diana isn't as interesting as Jackie Kennedy. She was basically a fragile, pretty, but rather thick woman who was almost perfectly incompatible with the institution she married into. It's a sad bad marriage but nothing more. By contrast, in JACKIE we have REAL narrative tension and REAL history being made. Jackie is a smart manipulative woman who wants to create the first draft of history as the myth of Camelot in opposition to the new LBJ White House and then Billy Crudup's journalist. There is no real narrative tension in DIANA.  Just a woman trapped for a 2 hour running time, looking beautiful and skewered. 

SPENCER is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. SPENCER played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA and UK on November 5th.