Your
guide in English to films showing in Germany.
Opening 6 Feb 2025
Directed by:
Pablo Larraín
Writing credits:
Steven Knight
Principal actors:
Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee
The American-Greek opera singer Maria Callas, born Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulos in Manhattan, New York, is Italian director Pablo Larraín’s eponymous film’s third tribute to strong, prominent 20th century women following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). La Divina (The Divine One) is the accolade bestowed because of her prowess as a bel canto soprano with expansive voice range, as well as impressive dramaturgy skills. Set in the late 1970s, the renowned and influential Maria Callas lives in Paris, somewhat attempting to resuscitate her career following a four-plus years hiatus. Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of the temperamental and tragic Maria is stunning, conveying La Divina’s willfulness, arrogance, manipulativeness, wiseness, witty playfulness, and debilitating lack of self-confidence. Archival footage accompanying end credits show how close Jolie comes.
September 16, 1977: Maria opens with a long shot into an elegant, diffusely lit drawing room where people talk in hushed tones. Rolling back one week, Maria drifts through this space questioning Ferruccio’s (Pierfrancesco Favino) moving the baby grand piano, while heading to the kitchen and Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) preparing her omelet. Maria’s loyal butler and housemaid are important for her life; their positions have evolved after decades-long employment to attendants-cum-companions, trusted beyond belief. Before leaving the apartment, Maria enquires of her hallucinated young filmmaker, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), about accompanying her to the theater.
The film unwinds and rewinds to phases in Callas’s past: her “lucky break,” secrets of her distant past, her manager-husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini (Alessandro Bressanello) and introduction to Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), meeting with John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), her sister’s (Valeria Golino) wise words of advice Maria disregards. Each section is a clue to the larger picture, illustrating Callas’s sensitivities and sometimes realistic approach to life: her relationship with her mother, about roles she performed, her health, why she shirks performing, and the love of her life.
English screenwriter-director Steven Knight’s script depicting Callas’s colorful past is understandably complicated. In concert with Larraín’s direction, Edward Lachman’s cinematography, and Sofía Subercaseaux’s superb editing, a delicate balance is maintained in telling Maria Callas’s story. It acknowledges, without wallowing, for example, the family’s abject poverty during WW II and a midnight visit to her lover. Maria’s incandescent denseness opens the senses to contrasts and contradictions in opera, history, histrionics and dependency, and the person. Its experience is “an exultation, an intoxication,” and an illumination. (Marinell Haegelin)
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