- Angelina Jolie, Valeria Golina, Kodi Smit-McPhee
- January 10th 2025
- 123
- Pablo Larrain
Angelina Jolie plays the opera legend Maria Callas during the final week of her life in 1977.
After Jackie and Spencer, director Pablo Larrain completes his trilogy of films about legendary 20th-Century women with Maria, a biographical drama about the opera star Maria Callas.
Much like its predecessors, Maria doesn’t cover the length and breadth of the soprano’s life and career and instead focuses on a very specific moment in time.
This particular story is set a week before the singer’s death in September 1977. During her final week, Maria spends her time wandering the streets of Paris, trying to regain her declining voice and reminiscing about the past.
She is on a lot of medication and is very lonely, with only her live-in butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) for company.
Having retired from performing, she also feels very lost without the adulation, the voice she once had, and her love Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer).
The film, written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, has a surreal, dream-like quality and tries to show us Maria’s interior life. She takes hallucinatory trips down memory lane and pretends she’s being interviewed by a journalist, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Jolie, although she doesn’t look much like Maria, gives a subtle and quietly moving performance that captures the singer’s outer strength and inner vulnerability.
She is particularly impressive in the singing scenes. Even though she is helped by Callas’s real recordings, her performances are very convincing and you believe you are watching her do it for real. Her attempts to get her voice back are very emotional and you can’t help but feel sorry for her.
Alongside Jolie, Favino and Rohrwacher deserve praise for playing her trusty and loyal staff, who have worked with her for so long that they’re basically her family. They do their best to care for her even when she doesn’t want to look after herself.
The film is also beautiful visually, with wonderful costumes and sets. The recreations of some of the famous opera houses are stunning and there is a standout surreal sequence in which she imagines herself in Madame Butterfly on a Parisian street.
Overall, Maria is an unusual but poignant biopic with an Oscar-worthy performance from Jolie.
In cinemas from Friday 10th January.
By Hannah Wales.
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