Maria

Visi d’arte

This is the third movie by Pablo Larraín in a series of tone poems about famous women, Jackie (Kennedy), Spencer (Princess Diana), and now Maria (Callas). This biopic approach, focusing on one moment in the protagonist’s life, tries to capture a glimpse of the person without telling the whole story from birth to death. Maria is set towards the end of La Callas’ life, as she lives in seclusion in Paris with her two devoted servants (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, two of Italy’s most prominent actors).

The challenge of any biopic is to allow us to suspend our disbelief and buy the illusion that the actor is transforming into a famous person. It’s mostly tough going but some actors fare better than others. In this case, the casting of Angelina Jolie is interesting but perhaps not in the way the filmmakers intended. The parallels between the actress and the character give the movie a certain frisson in terms of their shared fame and its attending gossip, but there is nothing about La Jolie that summons the larger than life charisma of La Callas. Prosthetics tend to be unsubtle, but they help actors resemble and step into the shoes of the celebrities they play. In this case, Larraín and Jolie forgo La Callas’ formidable nose, which was part of her allure. A daughter of Queens, New York, she could have been Medea, or Antigone, or Athena. La Jolie, as stunning as she is, looks like a…