It took absolutely everything I had to make it to the Venice Film Festival’s final screening of Maria. Pablo Larraín’s hotly anticipated tribute to the extraordinary life of opera legend Maria Callas premiered on the Lido on the starry showcase’s second day—but I wouldn’t be arriving until the third. I was due to land at 9 a.m., and the release was set to be played for festival audiences for the final time at 11.15 a.m. Could I get there in time? It seemed unlikely—but I had to try. So, as soon as my flight hit the tarmac, I hightailed it to the dock, faced an anxious wait for the water bus, jumped onto a shuttle as soon as I arrived on the island, dropped my suitcase off at left luggage, collected my festival pass, and literally sprinted to the venue alongside 20 or so other festivalgoers who, I assume, were in the same boat as me. And I made it—if only just.
Was it worth it? Well, yes and no. Maria is a deliberately strange and beguiling film—when it soars it, like the extraordinary woman at its center, seems entirely transcendent; and when it falters it, like the soprano at the very end of her life, cowers into a heap. And that is exactly where we begin: in Callas’s resplendent Parisian apartment, as the lauded diva lies dead from a heart attack, aged just 53. In a flurry of sepia-toned flashbacks—of a younger, happier, more radiant Maria—the clock is then turned back by a week. The signs, we see, were already there: gliding through her grand residence, the New York-born Greek soprano has a habit of breaking into song (her voice—recordings of Callas mixed with Jolie’s own singing—still extraordinary and goosebump-inducing), but she’s also erratic with her staff, addicted to pills, haunted by memories, and appears to be planning a doomed comeback.
This isn’t, of course, a conventional biopic—it’s exactly what you’d expect from Larraín, whose Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) wanders through the White House in sumptuous ball gowns feasting on wine and medication in Jackie, and whose Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) has visions of Anne Boleyn and gobbles down the pearls that have fallen into her pea soup in Spencer.
In Maria, our tormented heroine is visited by Mandrax, an interviewer played by an oily Kodi Smit-McPhee, who seems to exist only in her head and is named after the sedative she most depends on. When she meets with her sister (Valeria Golino) in real life, she wonders if she’s hallucinating. She sees the ghost of her former lover, Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). She swans around her rails of opulent clothes, stuffing pills into the pockets of fur coats. She keeps asking her beleaguered butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) to move her piano around the house, despite his bad back. And she is frequently lost in reveries, revisiting her most famous performances. “The stage is in my mind,” she purrs. To wit, when she strolls through the autumnal streets of 1970s Paris, she imagines a crowd of men belting out an operatic classic in front of the Eiffel Tower, an ensemble of geishas surrounding her as she performs Madama Butterfly, and, later, an orchestra filling her apartment.