Director: Pablo Larrain

Stars: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee

Following his biopics ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer’, Chilean filmmaker Larrain rounds off his ‘Lady in Heels’ trilogy with this elegiac study of the last days of opera diva Maria Callas. Scripted by Brit Steven Knight, the picture broadly focuses on the life of the singer away from the spotlight, as an ailing Callas (Jolie) rattles around in her luxurious apartment attended to by her faithful servants, the ever patient and perceptive butler Ferruccio (Favino) and housekeeper Bruna (Rohrwacher). In a running gag, the long-suffering Ferruccio must drag a sofa to the correct spot on his capricious boss’s whims. Later, accompanied by a British journalist (Smit-McPhee), whose name ‘Mandrax’ suggests he might not actually be there, Callas wanders around Paris and talks about her life. The interiors and Paris locales are gorgeously rendered in autumnal gold by cinematographer Edward Lachman, with Marienbad-style black and white for flashbacks to Callas’s childhood during the war, and her courtship of the troll-like but charismatic Aristotle Onassis (Bilginer). Guy Hendrix Dyas’s tasteful production design and Massimo Cantini Parrini’s gorgeous 70s costuming elegantly illustrates Callas’s sumptuously cocooned existence. Bringing some of her own enigma to the table, Jolie delivers a fully rounded Callas, imperious but mischievous too. But despite the high drama of the music, with Angelina doing some of the singing, the picture feels a little dour and airless, relieved only occasionally by snatches of tart diva dialogue.

David Willoughby

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