Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Did Maria Callas really once burn a pile of her own costumes? Yes, admits the superstar soprano. “May I ask why?” inquires her buttoned-up and visibly bedazzled young interviewer. “You may not,” she purrs, before later telling him anyway and admonishing him for not being more persistent in his probing.The same complaint might be levelled against the makers of Maria, a stately but conservative biopic starring Angelina Jolie and premiering at the Venice Film Festival that focuses mostly on Callas’s unglamorous, drug-addicted last days in a plush but stuffy Paris apartment. The politely respectful treatment is all the more surprising given the pairing of director Pablo Larraín, who showed no such restraint in portraying a blood-spattered post-assassination Jackie Kennedy, and writer Steven Knight, with whom Larraín collaborated on Spencer, an iconoclastic depiction of a royally gaslit Princess Diana.Casting proves key in this third portrait of a brittle, beautiful, broken woman. Jolie captures the glamour, intellect and pathos of “La Callas”, but remains emotionally remote. Still, there is fascination in watching the most celebrated voice in opera being lip-synced by the most famous lips in Hollywood, though the makers say Jolie’s singing voice too is in there somewhere.Her Maria is full of wit and contradiction. “Book me a table at a café where the waiters know who I am,” she demands of her butler (Pierfrancesco Favino). “I’m in the mood for adulation.” Yet when the café owner puts on a Callas LP, she declares that she never listens to any recording of her work “because it is perfect and a song should be performed in the moment”. In the very next scene we see the diva avidly scrutinising one of her live albums.What she is searching for is her old voice — and, beyond that, her old self. Flashbacks in black and white and grainy colour revisit opera houses packed to the rafters, emphasising both the deserted auditorium in which she now practises with a patient pianist (Stephen Ashfield) and the emptiness she evidently feels. This is what is now left of her once-glittering career. Otherwise she sings for her housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher) over the sound of a frying pan, the loyal Bruna declaring her efforts “magnificent” even while the lapdogs whine.Part of the blame for Maria’s malaise is laid at the prowling feet of Aristotle Onassis, played in flashbacks by Haluk Bilginer as a feline Don Giovanni who shamelessly woos “la prima donna assoluta” right under the nose of her first husband. But the real roots are shown to lie even further back in Nazi-occupied Greece and Maria’s ruinous relationship with her mother, who bullied and belittled the plump young prodigy and may thus have primed her for greatness. As the older Callas puts it: “Music is born out of misery and suffering. Happiness never produced a beautiful melody.”The script is filled with many such pronouncements — eventually too many, giving it the air of a carefully assembled collection of Callas aphorisms rather than the raw stuff of real life. There is also overuse of the interview device, which was deployed more sparingly in Jackie and Bradley Cooper’s broadly comparable Leonard Bernstein film, Maestro. Overall, there is too much tell, not enough show in this picture of a caged songbird.You may expect a Callas biopic to be grandly operatic. Larraín mostly goes the other way, with only a few cinematic flourishes, as when an adoring crowd under the Eiffel Tower erupts into the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore. Instead, the film’s best moments are intimate: Maria letting her guard down during a card game with her staff.But a final montage reveals what we have been missing, the real Callas displaying a full range of emotional expressiveness in a brief series of clips. In just a few moments she conveys warmth, girlishness, sadness, vulnerability, playfulness, joy. Perhaps Jolie as Callas is the wrong way round. Maria in Angelina: The Opera — now that might have been something.★★★☆☆Festival continues to September 7, labiennale.org/cinema
