Angelina Callas: cute, vulgar and superficial
Pablo Larraín has completed his trilogy of women mortified by extreme suffering with the umpteenth biopic about the singer Maria Callas. After Jackie, focused on the days following the assassination of her husband John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Spencer, about the three days that Lady Di decides to separate from Charles of England, now comes Maria, which recreates the last week of the soprano's life, alone and voiceless, in her wonderful apartment on Avenue Georges Mandel in Paris, accompanied only by her faithful domestic servants.
The choice of an actress like Angelina Jolie to play Callas is already a red flag that alerts us of everything we will see next. Larraín has avoided the singer's magnetic and unconventional physique. He has erased the charisma of an angular face, with expressive eyes and a charismatic nose that gave her an attractiveness full of character and passion. He has replaced it with the standard Hollywood beauty of Angelina Jolie, who has made no effort to look like Callas. Not even with makeup. Only the frame of iconic glasses as the only risk of characterization. Jolie has the beauty that pleases the male gaze and Callas had the beauty of someone who has the challenge of captivating. Larraín has built us a cheap and superficial cutie-Callas, who even in deep agony and pain, in extreme weakness, appears attractive in front of the camera, seducing the viewer through purely aesthetic suffering. Maria It is disturbing because the postcards he builds about the singer show a disturbing pleasure in female desperation. He uses an outdated narrative resource based on the absurd and toxic belief that pain elevates women and dignifies them, turning them into a kind of heroine. Larraín does not even know how to construct the root of that absolute desolation. There is no critical approach to her suffering beyond it. The woman who self-immolates, because sacrifice is her reason for being. La Divina is limited to a disturbance that glorifies her as the epic climax of her existence. As if her misfortune were the result of her simple incapacity. Director and screenwriter build a splendid twilight showcase in which to capture their prey. They even create a kind of destiny chosen for pleasure: "I have control, in the end," they make the protagonist say. Jolie's performance is affected and flat. You always see her, never Callas. They make us interpret a pain that is painful but that is always represented, paradoxically, with the utmost elegance and transcendent mysticism. They force us to swallow the supposed beauty of the disease. playbacks They are botched and despite everything that has been said about the actress's musical training, we find a character who sings with her face and not with her body. A slight trembling of the lips and a certain sadness in the eyes try to replace the genial force and the vigorous, obsessive and at the same time delicate talent of the soprano.
As you left the cinema, you stumbled upon Angelina Jolie again in the lobby. An old sign from the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith pointed the way to the toilet doors. Her photo, despite the gun in her garter, was of the same character we had just seen in the film. Maria It is constructed from the most stereotypical and old-fashioned male gaze, which reduces large female figures to a simple fragile and empty object, purely aesthetic, which Larraín wants to mold to his whim and imagination.
