Maria, Venice review: Angelina Jolie gives a career-defining performance as a haunted opera diva
Maria, Venice review: Angelina Jolie gives a career-defining performance as a haunted opera diva
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Chilean director Pablo Larraín concludes his thematic trilogy of 20th century biopics of famous women – after ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer’ – with this soft, restrained drama. Grief in Maria has a different aftertaste. It’s deeper, less acrid. The film closes out Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s thematic trilogy of feminine horrors, portraits of the rubbled dreams of women who walked the 20th century’s most privileged halls. Jackie’s monstrous climax splattered the blood of President Kennedy across his wife’s pale pink suit, as worn by Natalie Portman; Spencer sent Kristen Stewart’s Diana stumbling down the halls of Sandringham estate, nauseous, her body possessed by the foul, inescapable stench of duty.
Here, violence and possession make way for the haunted. Maria is the softer, more restrained film – less immediately striking, perhaps, but still deeply emotive. It invokes the last days of Maria Callas, “La Divina” of opera, as played by Angelina Jolie. She was striking in her beauty and formidable on stage, able to command her passions like a battalion, with a voice that seemed to swell up from somewhere deep in the earth.
Her career was also relatively short-lived. In the Fifties, she was one of the world’s most lauded women, a pivotal figure in the revitalisation of the bel canto operas of the 19th century by Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini, a kind of song deemed too florid and too romantic at the time by serious academics. By the end of the decade, however, she had abruptly entered semi-retirement. Her voice had become irreversibly damaged. She died in 1977, the public arguably more interested in her futile romance with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis – who married Jackie Kennedy instead – than in the legacy of her talent.
