When out with someone for a coffee I was told that I should watch a film about an opera singer named Maria. After being told of the film’s plot, I had envisioned a bombastic spectacle of a story filled with scandals and drama as over the top as you would ordinarily expect to find in an opera.
But, when it came time to sit down and watch the film, I was shocked at the sad and tragic tale that was being played before me. Maria (2024) is a film based on the true story of the American-born Greek singer known as Maria Callas (Angelia Jolie). The movie follows the last week Callas spent in Paris before her death in 1977.
It was an interesting direction to go in, to say the least; a movie depicting Callas’ rise to stardom would have been just as enthralling. But setting the story during her final week alive added an air of melancholy that helped the film in glueing people’s eyes to the screen. Eager to see what had happened right up until the point of her death.
The film does a good job of showing the sad state Callas’ life was in during her final week. The director, Pablo Lorrain, shows us a Maria Callas whose life has now seemingly passed her by. She tries very hard to regain her ability to sing the way she used to during private rehearsals with conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) but is held back by her ill health. Her problems began a while back, when she was set to perform in Milan but cancelled because of said medical issues.
This caused her to take a hiatus of a few years. In the meantime, she was in the care of her assistants Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Bruna (Albo Rohrwacher), who advised her to seek the help of doctors and take the right amount of medication. Callas did not listen to them and instead habitually overdosed on Mandrax, insisting it helped her condition despite the side effects.
Maria had informed her assistants that a TV crew was coming to interview her for an upcoming biography. The interviewer’s name was ‘Mandrax’. For those who can see where this is going, it becomes painfully obvious that this interviewer was a hallucination, no doubt of her abuse of medications, that served as some sort of figure that she projected her past experiences. Callas’ statement of ”I’m writing my autobiography” becomes very eerie when you figure out that the interviewer, Mandrax, was not real. A figment of her imagination.
Another thing that hindered Callas’ ability to recover her fading talent is her past and her inability to overcome it. Through some very powerful scenes, shot in black-and-white, we are shown different periods of Callas’ life that she reflects on. One of them is of a young Callas being forced by her mother to sing to Italian and German soldiers for money during the Second World War.
But the one that really haunts her is the memories of her marriage, or, shall we say, one of them in particular. In the 1950s, Callas was approached by a Greek/Argentine business magnate named Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), a man who seemed to make a sport out of charming as many women as he could. Callas initially rejected Onassis’ advances, but despite this, she did fall in love with him, leaving her then-husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini (Alessandro Bressanello).
The marriage to Onassis sadly fell apart due to the public scrutiny the marriage was under that Callas had felt had constricted her life. Onassis would go on to marry Jackie Kennedy, but on his deathbed, he was secretly visited by Callas, who admitted that she did love him. This visit is their last chance to reconcile over their failed marriage before Onassis’ death.
Her stubbornness gets the better of her, however, and towards the end of the film, despite her declining health, she belts out one last song alone in her apartment. She does this without any regard for the warning a doctor gave her about trying to sing, saying her body would not be able to handle the pressure at this stage. Moments later, Ferruccio and Bruna walk into the apartment to find Callas dead on the floor.
One thing that came to my mind whilst watching the film was that although Maria Callas lived a very intriguing life, her story echoed a certain stereotype that is played out over and over again, and for good reason. The stereotype of the tortured artist.
Wherever Callas goes in the film people praise her in a very subjugated manner, like suppliants to a God. The people do not see Maria, they see ‘Le Callas’ the alter-ego of Maria. A near-perfect creature whose voice moves people to tears. But what the people did not see was the pathetic state she was in during her final week.
Despite the fact that I was shown the difficulties she had been through, such as her difficult relationship with her mother, her being forced to sing for money, her failed marriage to Onassis, and her declining health, it becomes very difficult to feel any sympathy for her when we follow her during her last week alive.
Maria, unable to escape the narrative that she walks around with that is playing in her head constantly, behaved abrasively to anyone who tried to help. Constantly speaking down to Ferruccio and Bruna, subjecting them to non-sensical tasks like moving a piano constantly from one end of the living room to another or making them listen to her sing whilst they were trying to cook.
One scene that is particularly striking is when she is in a Café being interviewed by Mandrax, when suddenly the camera cuts to the waiter standing behind the bar, from this shot it is just the waiter and Maria, Mandrax is nowhere to be seen. She rudely insists that the waiter turn down the song he is playing, one of hers, but he refuses. She does not stop until he asks her why he should turn it off. Maria’s answer is that it is ‘perfect’ and that music should not be perfect, that it should exist as it is in the moment.
Whilst I agreed with that, what I did not agree with was Callas’ belief that all art comes from pain and suffering. That was a little bit too cynical for me, but given her experiences, it would not be hard to see how Callas came to this conclusion towards the end of her life.
I am a firm believer in the idea that one’s inner state is just as important, if not more so, than their outer state. While one could clearly see that Maria’s outer state was that of a woman with rapidly failing health, what was very apparent was the bad condition of her inner state, the effects of which could be traced long before she became physically unwell.
I remember being told once that: ‘You don’t get what you want in life, you get what you are’, and I think it is safe to say that Maria Callas got back everything that she was. One must remember that Callas was not surrounded by people we would consider pillars of virtue. Take her ex-husband, for example. Onassis was no different to any magnate who came before him or has come after him.
He was a man who was constantly whipped by his desire to seek and conquer women, which is what he did with Maria despite her already being married. But once they were married, Onassis’ sickness of needing to conquer new women would take hold of him, so much so that he would salaciously comment on other women in Maria’s presence.
And that is just one example without having to mention her being made to sing to Nazi soldiers by her mother, who would verbally abuse her for being ‘fat’. Callas’ effort to not be controlled by her mother or Onassis sadly resulted in her trying to control her own life, which had disastrous effects.
The abuse and heartbreak she experienced, and the effects that came from that, caused her to re-enact towards the people who were trying to help her with the very behaviour she was subject to in her younger years. She became her mother.
The film wasted no time in showing the extremes of Callas’s personality. Her demanding, self-aggrandizing behaviour and over-estimation of her own importance, as well as her private moments of self-loathing in her apartment.
One thing that I was left thinking about after watching the film was the responsibility of an artist in whatever field of art, they are in to not let their experiences get in the way of reality, of what is standing right in front of them. Whilst pain and suffering can sow the seeds for wonderous artistic expression, they can also send the artist who is unable to alleviate those feelings effectively into a downward spiral, as can be seen in this film.
Great art does come from pain, but it also comes from joy. Whether in times of sadness or joy, nothing can compare to the art that is produced by a person who knows how to spontaneously bring forth something that is inspired by the present moment in which they find themselves.