Maria * * * *

Philip, when I want your opinion, I'll ask for it. 

I believe this is to be the final film in a trilogy by Chilean director Pablo Larrain.  The three films are on toweringly famous women. Women of such stature they were almost unapproachable, unobtainable and famous in every country in the world:  Jacki Kennedy, Princess Diana and now Maria Callas.

His approach for each woman has been the same, focussing on a few days from the subjects life:  In the case of Diana (Spencer), it was her last days with Prince Charles, with Jackie (Kennedy) it was the days just after the assassination of her husband JFK, and with Maria it is the last days of her life, spent in her Paris apartment. 

Rather than giving us a woman alone, we also meet five other important characters: Her assistant, her housemaid, her arranger, and a young man who spends some time with her recording an interview and finally Maria Callas' sister Yakinthi, makes an important appearance. 

Her assistant is the long suffering Ferruccio, always dressed in house staff livery, yet with an ability to speak frankly to the prima donna.  He arranges doctors appointments for her against her will and dispenses her medication. He works alongside Bruna, a charmingly simple and modest housemaid who cooks for Maria and tends to her horrible dogs.  

When Maria is not happy with them, for whatever reason, she gets them to move the piano. Yet she loves them.  They seem to be her only friends. 

Maria Callas is played by Angelina Jolie which makes for a very flattering visual interpretation of her.  But Jolie does well in the role displaying Callas' ego, uncertainty, pride, and melancholy convincingly.

It is a fact that even though she was in her fifties and had not been on the stage for some time, she genuinely wanted to perform again, and to that end commenced secret rehearsals with an arranger, though her inability to regain her lustre is tragically obvious.

Larrain uses real footage of Callas from time to time and the segue from real imagery of Callas to Jolie works well.  Much of this footage can also be seen in the Maria Callas documentary (Maria by Callas) which would be well worth looking at prior to viewing this biopic.

Pablo Larrain has a wonderful ability to create a subjective dream like atmosphere in his films: we see things through the eyes and memory of the subject, showing their visions and interpretations: Outstanding scenes in Maria are a male chorus that appears out of nowhere, singing to her and her imagining of Madam Butterfly on the steps of the Paris Opera House in the rain. 

With her monochromatic memories of her time with Aristotle Onassis, and her difficult time in Greece in WWII, where it is suggested she made a somewhat forced compromise with the occupying German army, Maria makes a story as fascinating and powerful as Spencer and Jacki; and like them, if there is a truth, it is perhaps expressed more in spirit than in facts.