Callas Forever

Spain, France, United Kingdom, Romania, Italy

2002

111 Min

Color

1.85:1

English, French, Italian

Currently 2.4/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

|

EXEC Marco Chimenz, Giovanni Stabilini

PROD Riccardo Tozzi, Giovannella Zannoni

SCR Martin Sherman, Franco Zeffirelli

CAST Fanny Ardant, Jeremy Irons, Joan Plowright, Jay Rodan, Gabriel Garko, Manuel de Blas, Justino Díaz, Jean Dalric, Stephen Billington

The year is 1977, and we find opera legend Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant) in virtual reclusion, haunted by the ghosts of her career. Longtime friend and music promoter Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons) is in town ~~Paris~~ promoting a punk rock band, and decides to call on Callas. She, however, will not see him due to a disastrous Japanese tour set up for her by Kelly, and on which Callas was very disappointed with her performances. But after some rather aggressive persuasion, he gets in to see her. After chatting a bit, Kelly reveals his primary purpose for the visit: a new project for the aging diva. He proposes that she appear in a series of film versions of her greatest opera roles, but her voice would be dubbed from her best previous recordings. Initially resistant, citing her inability to bring anything new and fresh to roles she has played hundreds of times, she finally consents to doing a film version of Bizet’s Carmen, as she has never performed that role live on stage, only in recordings. Carmen goes into production, and with the help of Kelly, another longtime friend and journalist Sarah Keller (Joan Plowright), her director and costars, Callas rediscovers the thrill of artistic creation that she thought she had lost, and the love and adoration that millions of fans still have for the diva and her iconic voice. –IMDb

Director

Franco Zeffirelli

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli started out as an actor in the stage productions of Luchino Visconti, then worked as an assistant on several Visconti-directed films. After World War II, Zeffirelli launched a career designing, costuming, and directing operas, a field of entertainment to which he’d return periodically throughout his life and which led to his first directorial credit, the Swiss-produced filmization La Boheme (1965). Zeffirelli’s reputation in the 1960s rested on his boisterous, non-traditional movie versions of Shakespeare. He directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a lusty adaptation of Taming of the Shrew (1967), then became an icon for the Youth Movement by casting 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968). Zeffirelli’s eye for visual richness served him well in the opulent Brother Sun/Sister Moon (1973), a romanticized account of Francis of Assisi. Some of Zeffirelli’s later American films were unworthy of his talents… read more

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli started out as an actor in the stage productions of Luchino Visconti, then worked as an assistant on several Visconti-directed films. After World War II, Zeffirelli launched a career designing, costuming, and directing operas, a field of entertainment to which he’d return periodically throughout his life and which led to his first directorial credit, the Swiss-produced filmization La Boheme (1965). Zeffirelli’s reputation in the 1960s rested on his boisterous, non-traditional movie versions of Shakespeare. He directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a lusty adaptation of Taming of the Shrew (1967), then became an icon for the Youth Movement by casting 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968). Zeffirelli’s eye for visual richness served him well in the opulent Brother Sun/Sister Moon (1973), a romanticized account of Francis of Assisi. Some of Zeffirelli’s later American films were unworthy of his talents, though he made the most of the emotional possibilities of The Champ (1979) and actually helped Brooke Shields pass as an actress in the otherwise lachrymose Endless Love (1981). The director found himself in the center of a controversy upon finishing the expensive Euro-American TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth; certain religious activists, upset that the ads promised a “human” look at Jesus, forced several sponsors to withdraw their advertising from the telecast. (The “scandal” proved groundless, since Zeffirelli’s Jesus was one of the most reverently accurate ever seen in films.) Zeffirelli has been represented by his televised stagings of operas, many of which have shown up on American public television. And in 1990, Franco Zeffirelli returned to Shakespeare for an all-star film version of Hamlet, wherein the “surprise” was not so much Mel Gibson’s superb rendition of the title role as the fact that this was the first movie Hamlet that looked like it was actually taking place in 12th century Denmark. —allmovie.com

read less