Maria Callas, the world’s greatest opera singer, lives the last days of her life in 1970s Paris, as she confronts her identity and life.

Pablo Larrain’s previous two movies have focused on powerful female figures of the 20^th century in ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer’, and his next movie (‘Maria’) continues in that vein with an exploration of the life and final days of the famous Opera singer Maria Callas. Starring Angelina Jolie in the central role, it picks up with Callas in the final week of her life before she died from a heart attack in Paris aged just 53, as she looks back on her life and career. If you’ve seen ‘Jackie’ or ‘Spencer’, you’ll be aware that Larrain’s approach to a biopic is not conventional and that is the case once again with ‘Maria’, an essentially dreamy psychodrama that for large parts, uses a narrative device where Callas, through her overuse of the prescription drug Mandrax, hallucinates a young filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who has come to interview her about her life.

I thought ‘Jackie’ was a phenomenal piece of work, ‘Spencer’ less so, albeit with a great Kristen Stewart performance, and unfortunately I thought ‘Maria’ was the weakest of the bunch. This is utterly pretentious, boring and I thought Jolie’s performance was pretty disappointing given the praise it seems to be getting in some quarters. The narrative device doesn’t work as well as intended, and some of the dialogue is absolutely cringe worthy (“I’m not hungry. I come to restaurants to be adored”) and while I hope that it is intentionally so, I suspect that it isn’t and the writer (Steven Knight) genuinely thought he was being profound. I also thought the singing sequences were largely bad, with whatever they’ve done to combine Callas voice with Jolie’s singing or lip-synching leading to an awkward result that doesn’t work for me – particularly surprising as most music biopics these days use this approach and it’s generally a lot more seamless.

There are some positive elements, namely the score and the cinematography from Edward Lachman, and you can’t help but be swept up in the beauty of some of Callas music (before a terrible quote is pulled in to take you out of the moment), but overall, I thought ‘Maria’ was a really poor biopic that despite the quality of those behind it, didn’t remotely work for me. I like Larrain and he’s made some terrific movies, but with ‘Maria’ and ‘Spencer’, I’m now starting to think ‘Jackie’ was the outlier in respect of quality in these biopics of influential 20^th century women.

Rating: 2/5

Directed By: Pablo Larrain

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Aggelina Papadopoulou, Valeria Golino, Casper Phillipson and Alessandro Bressanello

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt22893404/