Diva: "Maria"

One of the issues affecting world cinema right now is the growing tendency among acclaimed arthouse filmmakers to pursue funding for English-language features. Almodóvar's The Room Next Door was, as most observers concluded, basically fine; it allowed its maker to expand his reach while trying something new. Yet few of us would rank the resulting film among the director's very best, or as among the most compelling reasons to visit a cinema in 2024. Pablo Larraín has been this way before, with 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer, impressionistic portraits of women at the mercy of the world and the men who run it. Both of those films were fine; semi-interesting in their refusal of standard biopic framing and conventional plot, they carried leads Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart somewhere close to the awards conversation, as their producers would surely have hoped upon initiating these projects. They were also ever so slightly off: movies shot in a second tongue, seen fumbling in places for the nuance, texture and rigour Larraín worked into his early, career-making run of films shot in his native Chile (2008's Tony Manero, 2010's Post Mortem, 2012's NO, 2016's Neruda). For long stretches, both Jackie and Spencer could have been mistaken for one of those chi-chi fragrance commercials directors often make with big stars between the less well-paying projects they really want to be getting on with: aspirationally glossy images, brisk cutting, movement for movement's sake, familiar faces being idolised by the camera. I was reminded of this during the montage that opens Maria, Larraín's study of opera legend Maria Callas in her final days of seclusion. We watch Angelina Jolie's Callas soaking up plaudits onstage, burning her costumes, facing up to the emptiness of her life offstage in 1970s Paris. We marvel at the interiors and clothes, the sunglasses and cheekbones. And we wait for a logo to appear, and the voiceover to kick in: New parfum. Solitude pour femme.

What follows never quite throws off an air of advertorial. When Maria isn't trying to sell us on the essence of Callas, it's trying to sell us bigtime on Jolie, her imperious jawline mapped in adoring close-ups that seem dictated less by the character (who claims to have lost her voice) than by the demands of a performer and her people. (Here, Larraín seems like a hired gun at the mercy of an especially exacting client; Jolie must have glided into the showroom and pointed at what Jackie and Spencer did for their leads before issuing her queenly command: "do me another one of those, would you?") The failure to sell me on either front was firstly a matter of form, and secondly situational. These heavily stylised films represent an attempt to escape the flat biographical realism one witnesses in a plodder like next week's A Complete Unknown and instead acknowledge and even embrace the biopic's artificiality; in certain respects, they may be more experimental than Larraín's early successes. They're also far less dramatically satisfying, because the frames set around them, polished yet self-conscious, keep getting in the way; it takes half the film to get used to the approach, and even then you have to look past the director's choices before you can begin to assess those of the film's subject. I'm also not sure this one has the right frame. Jackie was part Washington procedural, part ghost story, which felt right for a film about living at the mercy of the dead. Spencer was pure Gothic horror, because it was the story of a princess at the mercy of her keepers. Maria is couched as... well, what, exactly? A gilded mope was as close as I could get to summing it up, and it wouldn't be a failure of empathy if, in early 2025, with the world on fire and ordinary people facing mortal peril, audiences have a hard time relating to this adored figure as she wafts around her palatial residence, pokes over old memories and tells the imaginary film crew in her head how unhappy she is. For much of its duration, Maria is artists talking among themselves, money talking to money, though it began to grow on me in its closing stages; here, Larraín adopts the one good tack in Steven Knight's script, which is to approach Callas as if she were the tragic subject of one of her own arias. Paris, naturally, looks lovely, if shot in such a determinedly smoky soft focus it leaves you concerned you might be developing cataracts; cinephiles will also enjoy watching Jolie interacting with a spruced-up Vincent Macaigne as her butler. But for the third time with these Larraín biopics, I'm afraid I wasn't entirely buying it.

Maria is now playing in selected cinemas.