Kinofilm – »Maria«: Conventional Primadonna

Actually, you can already see the two life of Maria Callas on her face, and the film “Maria” begins, which, after “Spencer” about Princess Diana and “Jackie” about Jacqueline Kennedy, the third and last part of the tragic women Trilogy of the Chilean director Pablo Larraín is. Angelina Jolie plays the most beautiful voice of the 20th century, Operandiva Maria Callas, and as usual for Larraín, a close -up is never close enough. The film opens up a close-up: Jolie’s eyes, framed fat by black kohl, strictly, extremely precise, are contrasting with the mild, warm, vulnerable brown eyes, the Ed Lachmann mercilessly captures with the camera, while Jolie as the Callas From “Ave Maria” by Verdi sings.

In portraits, Maria Callas is said to have only had a place that she was happy: the stage. She said about herself: “I have two people in me. I want to be Maria. But there is also the callas that I have to do justice. ”And here the direct reference to the merciless mother comes into play, which forces her to sing. She has an unfortunate childhood and follows an eternal striving for perfection based on the mother. The marriage to her manager fails, the love affair with the shipowner tycoon Aristotle Onassis ends with the dear Jacqueline Kennedy. Maria Callas is said to have been extremely short -sighted, but nobody was allowed to know that. She never recognized the conductor’s cycle floor, but memorized all the scores and productions. Within half a year she starves from the body for 30 kilos. A life full of strict, but at least self -determined; At least to the outside. She wants to earn the same as a karajan, and it will be true that she enforced it at the time.

Nevertheless, he does not staged the Callas as a human wreck that has to indulge in the demise voyeurism of the audience.

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Larraín, an avowed opera fan, apparently saw the perfect addition to his previous films about famous women of the 20th century, whose life in the golden cage took place in front of the eyes of a greedy audience from which they tried to break throughout their life. The only difference is that Larraín’s Callas of the time in which an opera diva and her affairs still filled the title pages rather than that she made the attention of an endangerable. “I only go to cafés to be admired,” she says in a scene that is not to be surpassed in sadness.

What appeared to be original in “Jackie” and “Spencer”, namely Larraín’s soft spot for the concentration on a tiny excerpt in the life of the protagonists, seems long -winded and so strained to at least one Oscar for Angelina Jolie that the pompous scene is staged Combt only as a means to an end (Jolie has not even been nominated for her leading role). It fits the life of the Callas that Larraín arranges everything perfectly, after all, this is about the last few days in the life of the “Primadonna Assoluta”. The baroque apartment in Paris shines in heavy colors when the sun shines through the ceiling windows, framed with heavy curtains. The luxury swells out of every drawer and yet everything seems too tight.

Larraín shows a woman whose strictly externally brings a much more rigorous hardness inwards. The Callas is dependent on the tablet, does not eat anything for weeks, drinks all the more pearled from the finest glasses. Nevertheless, he does not staged the Callas as a human wreck that has to indulge in the demise voyeurism of the audience. She wants to get on the stage again to prove it herself, although it is clear from the start that the forces are no longer enough.

Jolie struggles to press into a facial expression. It is only of no use, you are not touched by the actual tragedy of this life. And that is due to the cold, on the compulsion to the interference -free image that runs through the whole film and the absence of at least a little bit of unconventional (the realization that life after fame is an existence as on Cold Turkey is not) . At least some brazen attempt to look behind the facade of this super diva would have been cheeky and charming.

The portrait, which is flawless and awesome, extends into the character drawings of the secondary figures. In addition to the Callas, your valet Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and cook Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) may appear, which, however, only serve as keywords for the sleek bon motets of the opera diva. Otherwise they do what employees do like this: Cooking loyal to cook delicacies that are not eaten and pushing a massive stoneway wing over the fishbone parquet umpteen times because it is never in the right place.

We see the despair that nothing is more as it used to be; A former icon that has been relegated to attitude that has lost intoxication. And this abysmal sadness may be the most interesting thing about the whole film, which otherwise gives a very penetrating way to not have a pity with the decaying main figure. But exactly the opposite occurs.

The affair, which was much too detailed in the film with the greasy shipping entrepreneur Aristotle Onassis, is supposed to show the Callas as a sovereign woman who was capable of great love, but instead you see her (if you don’t mean well with the film) as a trophy one Old rich guys who do not accept a no as an answer.

At the end of his women’s trilogy, Larraín turned from social policy in “Jackie” and “Spencer” towards art. Ingeborg Bachmann wrote about the Callas: “She is great in hatred, in love, in tenderness, in brutality … she can miss an expression because she knows what expression is.” Unfortunately, there is little of it in the film To feel because the pose is the only true primadonna.

»Maria«: Italien, Deutschland, USA 2024. Royal: Pablo Larraín. MIT: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher. 124 Minutten, start: 6.2.