Maria

 Maria is an account of the last week in the life of the opera star and diva, Maria Callas.  Directed by Pablo Larrain, the two-hour film on Netflix seems to be the third feature in his trilogy of movies about famous  and troubled women -- Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie, Lady Diana in Spencer, and now Maria Callas, a figure whose biography intersects with the life of Jackie Kennedy; Callas was the mistress of Aristotle Onassis, once the world's richest man, and, of course, after her husband's assassination, Jackie married the Greek shipping tycoon.  (In Maria, we see Jack Kennedy's half-hearted attempt to seduce Callas; as the movie portrays her, she's an even bigger and more selfish diva than was President Kennedy and, after insulting him with intimations about Jackie's infidelity, Maria shuts him down.)  Maria is stunningly beautiful and worth watching if you like opera for the soundtrack alone -- most of the scenes are underscored by Callas' famous arias -- but the silky material is paper-thin.  There's not much to the movie but Callas' self-destructive intemperance, her icy arrogance, and her inevitable death hastening to meet her.  The film is like an oratorio by Handel or Monteverdi -- it's a lavish spectacle composed on the theme of the death of a goddess.  Everything is preordained and there's no suspense.  A rare creature like Callas is too high-strung to survive and the film is basically a record of her arrogantly abusing everyone around her as she dies.  There's no suspense -- in the opening scene, framed by a languorous camera motion that frames a lavish room, we see Maria already dead on the floor.  Throughout the movie, Ed Lachman's camera slips and slides into compositions that use doors and corridors and windows as proscenium arches in which Callas performs -- her entire life is theatrical, operatic, larger-than-life and the camera centers her in ornate rooms as if she were on stage.  

I don't know much about Callas, but suspect that the film is largely accurate with regard to the details of the heroine's life.  Retired and alone in Paris, Callas plots to make a comeback.  Several times, she goes to a resplendent empty theater where she rehearses with a pianist -- but her voice is spoiled and she can't match the beauty of her singing when she was younger.  Callas is addicted to drugs, particularly something called "Mandrax".  The film personifies this medication as a strange-looking young man who imagined to be making a documentary film about Callas' life.  This peculiar and clever device allows Larrain to stage the movie as a memory play -- the picture flashes back to scenes in Callas' impoverished youth in Greece and her love affairs and her triumphs on stage.  "Mandrax" is said to "be an unreliable companion" by Callas'  longsuffering butler, Ferrugio.  Apparently, we are given to believe that Callas promenades around Paris talking with Mandrax when,  in fact, she is alone and speaking (and gesturing) to empty air.  Although Callas is badly wounded by her addiction and failing health, she's like the great operatic heroines that she has played on stage -- she isn't about to die without strenuously singing her way to the exit.  The film is rather arbitrarily divided into four acts with intertitles (clapboards) that refer to the imagined documentary by Mandrax and his cameraman.  There's a short prologue showing Callas dead on the floor under Old Master paintings in her palatial apartment; a short epilogue ends the film just before an obligatory montage of old footage showing the actual opera star.  (Callas is played with glacial aplomb by Angelina Jolie; in the old film, the real Callas looks much more girlish, vulnerable, and homely than the movie star impersonating her.)  Flashbacks show Callas at her first triumph at La Scala playing the role of Norma in Bellini's Il Puritani.  We see her interaction with Onassis -- a gala at which she abandons her husband to become the tycoon's mistress.  During World War II, German officers force her to sing -- she seems to be in a brothel operated by her avaricious mother with her more plain, but practical, sister. Callas is invited to President Kennedy's birthday party and we briefly see Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to him.  In a poignant scene, late in the film, Callas comes to Paris to bid farewell to Onassis who is dying.  He's married to Jackie who is on her way to his sickroom in a weird, gauzy room in a sort of round bunker -- it's an opera set, it seems, like everything else in the film.   Onassis says that he has always loved her.  There are scenes on Onassis' yacht -- he has a painting by El Greco in his bedroom.  In the present-day chronicle of Callas' last week, we see her tormenting her staff by making the butler, who has a bad back, move the piano at her whim -- he pushes the heavy grand piano back and forth with assistance of the long-suffering and servile maid (and cook) Bruna.  Callas interacts with her doctor who tells her that if she persists in singing she will surely die; the stress will be too much for her fragile body.  (The film is rife with cliches of this sort -- of course, Maria can't refrain from trying to sing and her aria at the end is literally her last gasp; we are shown a crowd of people smitten in the street by the sound coming from her apartment window.  Is she singing or just playing a record?)  Callas' rehearsals with the pianist are catastrophic.  A journalist tries to blackmail her by making a recording of her poor efforts at singing.  The loyal Ferrugio, who seems to love her, beats up the vicious newspaper man.  Callas' sister sends her narcotics by mail and there's a scene with the two women at cross-purposes, reminiscing in a Mexican restaurant in Paris called Acapulco -- this place reminds Callas of the Mexican restaurant where she finally broke free from her demanding stage-mother.  The picture is a bit like stylized version of Sunset Boulevard with the great diva in exile in her lonely, vast palazzo.  

The film is spectacularly beautiful as if in compensation for the very slender concept driving the narrative.  Callas hallucinates on the streets of Paris.  In one incredible sequence, she hears Puccini played by a full orchestra in a rainstorm -- it's a theme from Madama Butterfly.  The camera swoops forward in the rain, parting a crowd of blossom-like geishas in brilliantly red kimonos and the violins and cellos gush with water pouring off them in the strangely bright rain.  (The scene looks operatic itself, like Bertolucci at his most lavishly melodramatic.)  The music is gorgeous.  The movie is wonderful in its own way, but a sort of guilty pleasure -- there's not much in the way of content.  At one point, someone asks Callas:  "What is the reason?"  She replies "Opera has no reasons."