Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A production line is no place for a diva, but this is where Maria Callas ends up in new biopic Maria. The opera singer is played with magnetic splendour by Angelina Jolie, a casting choice this version of the subject would enjoy. It also comes as just the latest study of sad and celebrated 20th-century women from Pablo Larraín, the bright-spark Chilean director who also made Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). Like those jagged portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana, the movie unfolds as an extended day-in-the-life. Unlike them, it has the sense of a movie made largely because someone would pay for it.Still, Maria is a marvel to look at, unfolding in a Paris lit by pale September sun. It is 1977, and La Callas is a recluse, long gone from Covent Garden but never quite ruling out a comeback. Pills are popped. The butler frets.The script is by Steven Knight, who also wrote Spencer. Here, he supplies snappy one-liners, and the haunted mood shared by both Larraín’s previous biographies. But where they avoided flashbacks, the new film is heavy with them. We see the young Callas in occupied Greece, forced by her mother to sing for Nazi officers; the adult star seduced by a strutting Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). (That also means Maria all but physically bumps into Jackie. The way the overlap plays only reinforces the sense of a later episode in a franchise.)The more we are told, the less we learn. The assassination of John F Kennedy and saga of Diana Spencer were both so beyond-familiar those films could ignore the beginner’s guide, and bring us straight into psychological close-up. But Maria is uneasy about how much back-story the audience may already be aware of. The info-dumping that results actually makes the subject less knowable, stranding her on the surface of a Parisian Sunset Boulevard. It feels telling we’re reminded of another movie, and little of opera. The voice with which Callas transported audiences is occasionally heard, but mostly talked about — the film is more interested in its own.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from January 10 and on Netflix in the US now
