We see her mother forcing her to sing for occupying Fascists during the Second World War.
We see her make a bonfire out of her costumes after her voice has roughened.
Along with us, he listens to her stories.
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in ‘Maria’Pablo Larraín
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But Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee, appropriately strange) isnt real either.
Always obliging, he is actually a personification of the prescription drugs to which Callas is spectacularly addicted.
What is real and what is not real is my business, she says grandly.
Callas is perfectly aware she conjures people who arent there.
Of course she does.
The best part of her life the only part that matters has been about exactly that.
The actors commitment to this creation is obvious at every turn.
You cant show that without living it.
And yet, somehow, the portrait the film draws is curiously bloodless.
Callas the woman remains distant and unknowable; cunning to the end, she eludes us.
Callas is similarly studied, but to the point of seeming stilted.
We are watching a performance of a performance.
The curtain duly falls, reprising a prologue in which we see that Callas has just died.
The heightened emotion that transfixed us in the excerpts fromMedeaorMadama Butterflyis strikingly absent here.
Larrain keeps the camera at a distance; the body is hidden behind a chair.
