PABLO MAKES THREE

SINGER TURNS FINAL DAYS INTO PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Pablo Lorrain spins out a psychological drama about famous 20^th century opera singer Maria Callas.

The camera finds Callas dead on the floor of her Paris apartment in the opening scenes. The narrative then gives way to a wraparound and bends time backwards, but just for a week prior to the protagonist’s death in Maria (2024).

The story then begins moving forward to answer the question about what happened.

Lorrain turns these 7 days into the lifetime of the leading character by spinning in dramatized news reels and flash backs to an earlier time, such as when entertaining Nazi officers, while also getting closer to the estimated time of death.

A light aesthetic masquerades the film as a home movie and suspends disbelief so as to suggest the film may actually be occurring in realtime, like watching a film being made within a film that only dreams are made of.

Writer Stephen Knight collaborates with Lorrain again, after writing the script for Spencer (2016), which is a psychodrama biopic about just how unhappy and confused the life of Princess Diana may have been.

Lorrain is also known for Jackie (2016), in which the director uses the interview as a narrative device to tell the story of a still grieving First Lady, just weeks after the assassination of her husband, John F. Kennedy.

Maria is interviewed as well, except by her Quaalude fueled imagination.

Angelina Jolie creates a beautiful performance as the title character, compelling scenes in real movie time as well as in flashbacks to her more famous operatic performances. And then there are the impromptu meetings with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Overall, the film unfolds a bit like an opera with the camera lens often fitting a room into the view finder like looking at the stage from the orchestra row seats of an opera house.

Jolie sings in several scene sequences, sometime in movie realtime in her kitchen and sometimes in movie flashbacks to performances at the opera house.

Maria is presented as being in control of her last days and directing the action of others just as she might in an opera with everyone being there and playing a role to facilitate her singing. The 2 h 4 m runtime of the film may or may not be the length of a real life opera performance.

Everything involved and all, Jolie creates a certain beauty in the character study and compels the scenes forward with this unpredictable uncertainty about what is real and what is imagined, and what parts of each form the diva’s final self penned opera.

The film quickly becomes intertextual and self referential – with the latest assumption being that this particular flashback will be a new narrative moving forward at least for a few more scenes.

But Lorrain brings Maria back to the Paris apartment, and then from there, everyone may go to a famous Parisian sidewalk café.

Jolie is more often than not centered on stage, but she shares several scenes with Maria’s butler and housemaid, Ferruccia and Bruna, played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, respectively.

Ferrucia spends a lot of time complaining about his back pain while moving the piano around in the apartment at Maria’s direction. This not so gentle play soon becomes a domino for a bit of humour found elsewhere, whenever Maria is not brooding.

The uncertainty created by the imaginary narrative of Maria being interviewed by her Quaalude induced imagination is a kind of running joke among the servantry, who take their part in ‘the play within a play’ very seriously.

The film in the end draws an analogy between Maria losing her voice and Maria dying of a broken heart because she had lost her voice.

The film is kept a bit gritty with a documentary tone and a light treatment of aesthetics that keeps everything grounded inside the Paris apartment – like a family secret.

At times, everyone seems to be looking through the eyes of the hallucinating title character, which eventually brings everyone around to thinking about how tragic the opera singer’s last days were.

The famous life can be glamourous and engaging, but may often be, particularly at the end of the day, plain and ordinary.

Maria begins streaming on Netflix on December 11.