Maria (2024)

Songbird

Maria is the third panel of Pablo Larraín’s loose trilogy about women living inside their own iconography — after Jackie and Spencer — and its ground rules are announced inside the first ten minutes. Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie, is in Paris in September 1977, overusing Mandrax, a sedative. The journalist trailing her with a camera crew, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, shares the drug’s name. He may not exist. That conceit is the diegetic anchor for everything else the film wants to do. Without him, the orchestras appearing in the Paris streets have no justification, the format shifts have no premise, and the film collapses into a stately end-of-life chamber piece. With him, the whole movie is allowed to behave like a hallucination because Callas is already inside one. It is the same structural move Larraín made with the journalist frame in Jackie and the Anne Boleyn material in Spencer — the destabilizing invention that converts biography into cinema rather than re-enactment.

The film’s central achievement is that it installs reverence before it punctures it. The recordings playing in the apartment, the archive footage of her at La Scala, the flashbacks staged like ritual, the way Ferruccio and Bruna handle her as if she is still made of porcelain — all of it constructs Callas-the-god across the first half of the film. By the time the vocal coach quietly tells her the voice is gone, the film has spent its running time building the thing being lost. You cannot feel a fall unless you have been put at the height. Maria puts you there even if you came in cold.

The vocal coach scene itself — Jolie sings, he tells her the truth, no score, no cut to the past, the camera holds — is the puncture, and it is the entire film in miniature. It is also where Jolie’s work resolves entirely. She refuses imitation throughout, finding instead an architecture of shoulders forward, chin tilted, voice somewhere between mid-Atlantic and unplaceable, and inhabiting it as posture rather than mimicry. That architecture only earns its weight in the moment it collapses. The vocal handoff between Jolie and the Callas recordings is clean enough that the seams stop registering; what you hear is a woman who can no longer reach what she was, trying, failing, trying again.

Edward Lachman’s cinematography is doing more than burnishing; it is arguing. The black-and-white sequences are not nostalgia. They are memory as performance, the archive footage of a self the subject is curating. When Larraín cuts back to color, we are with the body — the diminished body that can no longer perform what the archive remembers. Lachman drew his fourth Oscar nomination for this work, after Far from Heaven, Carol, and Larraín’s El Conde, and Maria is among his most controlled achievements. The formats are not assembled for visual variety but for an argument about how memory functions for someone whose memory is partly other people’s footage.

The supporting work is quiet enough to miss. Pierfrancesco Favino, as Ferruccio, the butler, plays loyalty as sustained grief. He is watching her die in slow motion, and his job is to keep making her tea. Alba Rohrwacher, as Bruna, the housekeeper, gives the film its steadiest note of unsentimental tenderness. The apartment scenes — three people moving furniture and arranging meals around an unraveling center — are blocked with patience, and that patience is structural. It is what Larraín substitutes for plot in a film whose subject is no longer capable of plot. Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes track her as an object curating itself, and Guy Hendrix Dyas’s production design builds rooms that look both lived-in and faintly stage-dressed, as though she has been waiting decades for an audience to come back.

There is one scene where you can hear the film staging itself. Callas goes to a Paris cafe, the bartender plays one of her own recordings, and Ferruccio has to retrieve her. The bartender knowing the record, the public exposure, the assistant’s arrival — all of it has the shape of a beat written toward rather than discovered. But the contrivance is partly the point. She is living inside her own myth. The world keeps arranging itself into scenes about her. She cannot go to a cafe without encountering herself, and the constructedness of the scene reflects something true about her condition. Larraín clears the high wire. You can feel him on it, which you cannot elsewhere, but the substance of the moment carries it.

The closing passage — her body finally giving out in the apartment, the staff she has both relied on and tormented becoming the only witnesses — is staged without the flourish the premise might have invited. The god was in this body. The body fails. The god is fallen. We are all less for it. That is the tragedy: not celebrity decline, not a famous woman undone by pills, but an entire artistic capacity being withdrawn from the world with no recovery available. Maria sits alongside Jackie as the strongest of Larraín’s three icon films. Jolie’s work here is the most disciplined of her career.