Maria on Canal Plus: a breathless biopic despite Angelina Jolie (review)

Pablo Larrain signs a deliberately deadly film about Callas with a very diligent Angelina Jolie. Missing the essential: a breath of life.

After Jackie and Spencer, Chilean director Pablo Larrain completed his trio of female biopics this year with Maria, to be seen this evening on Canal Plus (and streaming on MyCanal). A film that didn’t really win over the Première editorial team when it was released in the cinema…

Filmed biographies embalm more than they liberate souls, damned by the paradoxical desire to make them (re)live. A trap of cinema that few accept. Milos Forman with his Amadeus on the tightrope between iconoclasm (the piercing and grotesque laughter of Mozart) and black mass (the fantasized confrontation of the prodigy with Salieri) had transcended by transfiguration the Austrian monument which had once again become a jumping and impertinent jaunt cluttered by his genius. None of that a priori with Pablo Larrain, who has become the champion of the chic biopic (Neruda, Jackie, Spencer…) which he covers in a registered trademark manner. More or less consistent copies of a style which operates by vagueness capable of restoring a deadly subjectivity.

We remember Natalie Portman as Kennedy’s combative widow, removed from current history to better stage it (the presidential funeral). Death, therefore, would not be true to touch the famous psyche. There you go, Maria (Callas). Here too, only the first name is enough to designate the subject. It all begins with the inevitable ending, filmed in a theater style set in a gigantic Parisian apartment. Larrain, through an advertising montage, connects the views of Callas finally leaning against the balcony of a Place Vendôme hotel waiting for the brand of a perfume to come and justify the pose. It’s downright the death of cinema, we say. It is a bit, even if the sequel will seek to grasp a truth that the overly articulated story struggles to touch. Angelina Jolie performs beautifully but sings in the emptiness of an echoless space. Speechless diva. Sad project.

By Pablo Larrain. With Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher… Duration 2h03.