We round up the reviews for Pablo Larraín’s latest biopic, focusing on the opera singer Maria Callas.
The Guardian: **** “If every opera courts disaster, it follows that the good ones lean into the danger, sustaining their note of keening pathos to slowly enmesh us in the drama. And so it proves with the magnificent, declamatory Maria, a film that’s as precious and unwieldy as that pesky grand piano. Midway through, I was all set to file this as a posturing distraction, destined for a life as a high-camp curio. But it ground me down, won me over and by the closing credits, God help us, I was hoping for an encore.”
BBC.com: *** “As that unlikely exchange might suggest, this Callas is an icon rather than a human being. Larraín and his team refuse to take her down from her pedestal, so they don’t imbue her with any of the vulnerability or the playful vivacity that the real Callas has when she winks and laughs at the camera in snippets of footage over the closing credits. Throughout the film, various people draw a distinction between “Maria” the woman and “La Callas” the superhuman diva. Its title notwithstanding, Maria is definitely about “La Callas”.”
The Independent: **** “Here, violence and possession make way for the haunted. Maria is the softer, more restrained film – less immediately striking, perhaps, but still deeply emotive. “
Variety: ““Maria” bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín’s lavish empathy and filmmaking skill. Yet the movie, in contrast, is driven by a dramatic fatalism that does it little favor. It’s the first of these three films that’s about a great artist, yet Maria, somehow, seems a lesser figure than the heroines of “Jackie” or “Spencer.” Or, at least, it feels like there’s less at stake.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “The movie is beautifully crafted, of course, graced with sumptuous visuals from the great Ed Lachman. The cinematographer captures the City of Light in 1977 in soft autumnal shades highly evocative of the period and shifts into black-and-white or grainy color stock for Callas’ many retreats into memory. Lachman, who was Oscar-nominated for his breathtaking chiaroscuro work on Larraín’s last feature, El Conde, shot Maria using a textured mix of 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm, along with vintage lenses.”
Deadline: ” The heightened emotion that transfixed us in the excerpts from Medea or Madama Butterfly is strikingly absent here. Larraín keeps the camera at a distance; the body is hidden behind a chair. Nothing to see here, you might say, even though there has been — as always in a Pablo Larraín film — so much to see. Something is missing. Perhaps it is that there is nothing of the grit and grind of politics, which often works as the sand in his narrative oyster, not only in the Chilean films like Neruda or No, but Jackie and Spencer too. Maria tells a fascinating story, but it lacks that rasping edge.”
The Telegraph: **** “This biopic, which focuses on the last week of the soprano’s life, doubles down on Jolie’s innate glamour and cranks it up to regal extremes.”
UK release date for Maria has yet to be announced.