Maria

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Pablo Larrain (“Spencer”) completes his 20th century women trilogy with “Maria,” focusing on the great opera singer Maria Callas. The film is a striking visual catalogue of the icon. While it has a dispassionate narrative in keeping with Larrain’s style, it still manages a certain affect with its rhythmic imagery combined with Angelina Jolie’s piercing stare.

The film takes place during Callas’s later years when the Diva was quite fearful. Her health was failing, she was addicted to pills and losing her voice. Callas is haunted by the ghost of her dead paramour Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer).

The imagery with cinematography by Edward Lachman contains the pathos of a Richard Avedon photo spread. Alternating from black and white to color between Callas the actual person and Angelina Jolie as Callas, the film creates a surrealistic pop art juxtaposition of the performer as artist and Maria Callas as a human being.

Callas is running out of options here in 1970s Paris and Aristotle Onassis is a delegating emperor wanting to collect women like rare art pieces. Callas will not be contained.

Callas gets the news from the doctor that her liver and heart are failing. Ignoring advice, she trains tirelessly in an effort to regain her voice. But she does not want to sing for an audience or a record she only wants to sing for herself.

The images of the film combined with montages in Callas’s mind becoming a Dalian kaleidoscope of haunt and regret. Jolie is often seen from the back very like a Hitchcock film or a Salvador Dali portrait of Gala.

When Callas does resume her art, her voice soars through her living room window. The final scene, which illustrates Maria Callas as a fallen white bird, echoes the poignant melancholy of an Edward Hopper painting as well as the eerie curiosities of Balthus.

Though most of the singing is done by Callas herself, Jolie executes the final song in her own voice, and it is a stirring and startling segment.

This final film is a solid conclusion to Larrain’s trilogy, which featured powerful women blighted by their own self-created ghosts who all had to journey to Pop Art Hell in order to reclaim their very human and very fragile mortal selves.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com