Maria (Pablo Larraín, 2024).
She is a First Lady, a princess, a primadonna. Invariably, she is draped in jewels. Little by little her eyelashes will unstick and dangle from the corner of a red-rimmed eye; the silk sleeve of her dress will fall 30 degrees toward her elbow, and her gait, once dignified, will begin to wobble. She is American, British, Greek. She lives in the White House, in a Norfolk castle, in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris.
She is the subject of the director Pablo Larraín, who with Maria (2024) has completed a triptych of films about glamorous and tragic twentieth-century idols: Jacqueline Kennedy (Jackie, 2016), Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021), and Maria Callas. Larraín proceeds from the notion that these women are united by their suffering. The director’s earlier forays into history mostly focused on his native Chile, including a reimagining of the dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire (El conde, 2023) and a biopic of the poet and politician Pablo Neruda (Neruda, 2016). His latest films, still about public figures, trace and retrace a single arc of personal history: a beautiful, rich, and famous woman falls from grace.
Each installment of the trilogy is set in the few days’ lead-up to or aftermath of a disaster. Though many a traditional biopic devotes itself to an explanation of how a notorious person came to be of note, Larraín’s films trade on the certainty that we are well aware of who these people are—and of how they are perceived by the world. We know from the outset that Kennedy was famous for her refined taste and intellect, that Diana was Windsor’s relatable “people’s princess,” that Callas’s larger-than-life voice changed opera in the twentieth century. Larraín counts on us knowing, too, about the tragic aspect of each of their lives: Kennedy’s blood-stained pink suit, Charles’s public betrayal of Princess Diana, Callas’s forced retirement. He doesn’t need to explain why these women are all so sad; their misery is as intrinsic to their depiction as Kennedy’s coiffed bob, Diana’s shoulder pads, Callas’s enormous, kohl-lined eyes.
Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016).
Each subsequent effort in Larraín’s tragic-heroine set improves upon the previous one. The unrelenting claustrophobia of Jackie doesn’t evoke despair as much as it does a static, unchanging idea of it. Though Spencer spends a lot of time fixating on the image of Diana in various compelling, but hardly revealing, tableaux—poised on the edge of a rotting staircase or lying crumpled among the sheets in a canopy bed—she ultimately experiences emotions other than agony, and, significantly, has a sense of humor. By the time Larraín tackles the life of Maria Callas, he has accepted that his subject is more than the sum of her suffering. Angelina Jolie—perfectly cast as the erstwhile doyenne of opera, being herself the erstwhile doyenne of Hollywood—might have had something to do with that shift; in a panel after Maria’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Larraín mentioned that Maria’s armored exterior was conceived by Jolie, who saw more strength and obstinacy in the character than the director did.
Larraín’s best strategy is to foreground his protagonists’ roles in the making of their mythology. Both Jackie and Maria are framed by interviews in which they elaborate upon the pain of the particular moment they’re living. In the former, a reporter from Time (Billy Crudup) sits down with Jackie at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port soon after the assassination to conduct the interview in which she first made the now famous association between her late husband’s presidency and Camelot, with its idealism and chivalric heroics. Larraín’s reporter comes across as hostile to the grieving widow, though in truth, the piece that resulted from their conversation is laden with sentimentality. “She remembers how hot the sun was in Dallas,” Theodore H. White wrote, and later: “She remembers the roses.”
In Larraín’s retelling, Jackie fights against two antagonistic forces: White, who pushes her on every topic, and the budding Lyndon B. Johnson administration, which intends to keep her at an arm’s length in order to establish the new president’s authority as he takes up residence in the White House. The film opens with Jackie’s 1962 televised White House tour, in which she walked more than 80 million viewers through her extensive refurbishing project. The White House restoration, framed by the First Lady as a revival of the building’s history and legacy, had the added effect of combining Jackie’s aesthetic verve with a purpose: the White House now looked meaningfully good. In the days after her husband’s assassination, her bereavement is compounded by the loss of her role as First Lady. She has grand ideas about what kind of ritual would befit a president like Jack—she wants to walk in the state funeral procession, which the Secret Service strongly advised against. Jackie’s dramatic tension rides on the presence of these antagonists and the overwhelming forward momentum of history, which rushes toward her like a train; she can either try to jump aboard or get run over.
Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016).
Unable to surface from a hazy spiral of grief, Jackie is flattened. She drinks and cries and tries on all of her dresses. The only person who can get through to her is her friend Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), with whom she’d been close since childhood and who worked in the White House as Jackie’s social secretary. Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) is warm and compassionate, but he is too ensnared in the political ramifications of his brother’s murder—not to mention his own grief—to be a true companion.
For Larraín, it’s better to get Jackie isolated; his ostensible purpose is to imagine what the aftermath of the assassination must have felt like—the pit of her defeat. At the President’s funeral, Jackie wears a black veil that was thin enough to show her face but dark enough to shield her from the public’s prying eyes. The funeral scene is intercut with Jackie’s flashbacks to the assassination, a juxtaposition that reminds us of the gap between what we think we know about any given public figure and their actual experience. At a screening of the film, Larraín reflected, “You can get a minute-by-minute account of everything that happened the day that JFK was shot. But, of course, once the doors closed, nobody knows what happened. And those were the doors for fiction.”
The real tragedy here is that, given the opportunity to walk through those doors—to find truth in imagination, to get closer to the reality of another person’s experience—what Larraín came up with was the most predictable version of Jackie. Alone, in the wee hours of the night, his Jackie is engulfed by her own performance, unable to shed the cloak of symbolism of what she was supposed to embody: a paradox of strength and frailty, “an embodiment of grief” and “a symbol of strength,” as Manohla Dargis put it when she postulated Jackie was not merely a window, but the Widow. Even when no one was watching her, when those doors closed and Nancy and Bobby left and she was faced with the room she used to share with her husband, which she had meticulously refurbished so it would feel like their home—even then, Larraín’s Jackie isn’t any different from how she was in the presence of Nancy or Bobby; she never breaks the brittle poise she held at the funeral. She is what everyone always wanted her to be: everything except a person.
Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021).
If Jacqueline Kennedy was supposed to be every woman but no woman you’d ever seen before, Princess Diana was remarkable for having a quality rare among the royals: accessibility. She was no commoner, but her devotion to philanthropy, as well as her charisma, connected her to an adoring public. Nearly 30 years after her death, Diana is still a trendsetter: her choice of athletic wear has inspired a yearslong biker-short-and-sweatshirt sensation. For a fashion icon so fond of diamonds and pearls, it’s this casual version of Diana that lives on in the popular imagination. Through Larraín’s lens, though, she is mostly a wronged, insecure, and slightly irrational woman, literally haunted by the ghosts of her past.
Spencer takes place in 1991, during Christmas at Sandringham House, when Diana’s marriage is on the verge of collapse; only once do we get a glimpse of Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles’s supposed lover. Kristen Stewart’s clipped diction is a natural channel for Diana’s torment: when, refusing to be weighed before Christmas dinner, as is custom, she quips that her weight is half jewelry, her joke floats in the silence, then falls flat. No one thinks she’s funny; no one, except her faithful aide Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is charmed by her quirks. Diana hates Christmas with the royals, and they hate her, too, especially the villainous Major Gregory (Timothy Spall), a real stickler for traditionalism who spares no sympathy for her misery.
Larraín seems to understand that there wasn’t much Diana could do to feel like herself except steal little freedoms: she eats from the walk-in refrigerator in the middle of the night and sneaks over to Park House, the now abandoned house on the Sandringham estate where she was raised. Frustratingly, he is much more taken with the image of her wobbling through the palace and throwing up her meals; the film becomes stuck in the circularity of such moments. Her disordered eating, presented with little curiosity or tact, ends up simplifying rather than deepening any understanding of her suffering. As for who Diana is beyond being skinny, beautiful, and sort of crazy, it doesn’t seem to matter, at least not as much. After all, who wouldn’t go crazy, having to live such a restricted life? Diana returns repeatedly to a scarecrow that watches over Park House, its weather-beaten clothes like a monument to her own childhood, which was, if not ordinary, then at least less restricted. But when she breaks the rules to inspect what remains of the house, all she can do is stand at the top of a rotting staircase, going half-insane from hearing voices, and pull at her pearls, a gratingly obvious gesture toward what “freedom” might mean. (One imagines a free Diana would’ve still worn the pearls.)
Childhood is a pressing concern for Diana. She was famous for advocating for children, and it’s in her role as a mother that she comes alive. Her playful, rebellious side emerges in her rapport with her two boys, which grants her some more freedoms: she doesn’t heed the proposed bedtimes, she lies on the floor with her sons and sneaks extra Christmas gifts. The older William, attuned to his mother’s emotional life, repeatedly asks her what’s wrong. They know their intimacy is unusual and act like it; there is an almost transgressive thrill to their closeness. When ultimately she manages to escape back to London with her sons a few days ahead of schedule, their drive in her Porsche 911 is far and away the film’s best moment. Diana laughs as she turns the music up to the highest volume, and a lightness floods the car, as if relief itself were powering it. For a song, she chooses the superhit “All I Need Is a Miracle” by Mike + the Mechanics; for shoes, a pair of Chanel flats; for a car, a German, rather than an English, manufacturer. And then, there is the broader appeal of singing with the top down, wind in your face, on the way to get fast food at a drive-through. It would make anyone smile. Diana springs into pure action: it’s as if Larraín forgot, for a moment, that he was supposed to make her crumble under the weight of her own misery. Once Diana is allowed a little air, she becomes a person rather than a martyr.
Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021).
The path from muse to icon to martyr is well trod. Nancy Milford, in her bestselling 1970 biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, explores how women can actively shape, and subvert, that arc. People who knew the Fitzgeralds were at once dazzled and unsettled by Zelda; she was so intensely herself, it was disturbing. F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled the flappers of his fiction on his wife, and she was an acutely aware muse who scoffed at old-fashioned depictions of female suffering, such as poor Tess D’Urberville. She thought their saintlike suffering, which was premised on the idea that misery can be edifying, was not only out of touch but criminally tedious: “Their tragedies, redolent of the soil,” she once wrote, snobbishly, “leave me unmoved. If they were capable of dramatizing themselves they would no longer be symbolic, and if they weren’t—and they aren’t—they would be dull, stupid and boring, as they inevitably are in life.”
For Fitzgerald, to dramatize herself was to follow a code of behavior that would, in turn, sustain her public image. A flapper like herself, she wrote in 1922 for Metropolitan Magazine, “flirted because it was fun to flirt,” and “was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do,” rather than what was deemed appropriate by polite society. Ironically, although Fitzgerald’s game of self-invention was novel in the early 1920s, the strain of performing caught up with her, locking her in a bind. Though one would more readily associate her with Daisy Buchanan, in some senses she was like Gatsby: once the party cleared out, she was left lonely and empty-handed. The only incentive to endure the grueling hangover was the prospect of another night during which to perform her put-on gaiety. Her “philosophy of life,” wrote Milford, “was an application of business acumen to femininity: you created yourself as a product and you showed yourself with all the flair of a good advertising campaign. … That this code [of existence] was potentially destructive and that it would demand its own continual and wearying performance she did not take into account.”1
Fitzgerald built her reputation on being wildly unpredictable, but soon enough her stunts stopped being funny and became scary: she would jump out of cars, dive into the ocean from 30-foot-high cliffs, burn her clothes. This period culminated in a love affair with a French officer that nearly destroyed her marriage and triggered the first of several successive mental breakdowns—the burden to dramatize herself spun out of control. Through the various circumstances of his suffering icons, Larraín is trying to get at a related realization: performance, once his women’s ticket to notoriety, ultimately fails to protect them from their own tragedies. Larraín loses the plot when, in the face of such a realization, all his women can do is balk and give. They put up no fight; they simply sink into their misery the same way they sank into their silks and chiffons.
Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote that Fitzgerald “appeared to experience the desperate creative urge that some have even without having an art”; her need for expression was what pushed her to live another day. For some time, it was the goal of becoming a professional ballerina that kept her going; when her husband and doctors suppressed that ambition for being too unrealistic, she wrote a novel. As Hardwick argues, it’s Zelda’s strenuous effort to give herself over to art—and to discipline—that moves us to see her not merely as a victim of her own mind but as a force that could, however fleetingly, control it. People do, of course, sink; but just as often they try to swim.
Maria (Pablo Larraín, 2024).
With Maria, Larraín finally seems to have taken an interest in the swimming; it’s not incidental that Callas is the only artist among his three subjects. The decisive turn in this film is that the singer actively fights to preserve herself after the loss of her voice and in anticipation of her death. Maria is a formidable opponent of her own misery, and her struggle and ultimate demise are therefore far more affecting than any number of sequences featuring Jackie stumbling through the White House or Diana pulling at her pearls. From the nadir of her disappointment, dispossessed of her voice and therefore of the ability to be the woman she’d once been, Maria keeps showing up to the theater. Sometimes she sings just a verse, other times she tries for a full song; but try she does, even after an admiring and kindly doctor tells her in no uncertain terms that her voice will never return.
Jackie’s interview framework was based on a real Time article, but in Maria, the press’s interest is hallucinated by its protagonist: Maria is depressed because her voice is gone, and to alleviate the pain, she takes large quantities of sedatives. In the last week of her life, she envisions the presence of a television crew filming a documentary about her, though she explains away her ruminations as an effort to write an autobiography. She doesn’t need paper and pen to write a book, she says; it’s all in her head. She names the young, devoted journalist of her hallucinations Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) after her favorite pill. But he’s not the only man conjured by her imagination: she tells her housemaid, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), that she is routinely visited by her late ex-lover, Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), in the middle of the night. “Doctors often label revelation as illness,” she replies when Bruna asks if she has mentioned these visions to her doctors.
Maria opens on a shot of Callas’s living room, where medics are lifting her dead body under the watchful eyes of Bruna and her counterpart, the ferociously loyal Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino). Because the first thing we learn about Maria is that she will die, the film plays like a countdown to her ultimate demise. The interviewing with Mandrax—or the purported writing of her autobiography—is a way for her to cross the final t’s of her career and life; some of her last acts are meeting with her estranged sister and telling Ferruccio and Bruna, in her own unconventional way, how much they have meant to her. There is one question Maria repeatedly asks herself—and which others constantly ask her, whether they are doctors or prodding reporters who want to know what happened: can Maria Callas live without performance?
Maria (Pablo Larraín, 2024).
By 1977, the year of her death, Callas’s voice had long been in decline. She hadn’t set foot on a stage in more than four years and was certain that she was never going to perform again. Callas was notorious for being “difficult”—a telling epithet—because she wouldn’t agree to a performance unless she thought the role was perfect. The first time she was approached by the Metropolitan Opera for a contract, when she was still a young singer, she turned it down because the general manager had offered her supporting, rather than leading, roles. Maria tells Mandrax during their first sitting that on stage, there were two sides of her: one that rose to the occasion and one that insisted she should be ashamed of herself. And life off the stage? It doesn’t exist: “The stage is in my mind.”
The structure of Maria operates on two levels: the tempo of her recollections and the countdown to her death. In her last days, the distinction between reality and imagination has very little importance to Maria. As a result, the timeline meanders: her memories don’t arrive in chronological order but are prompted by her efforts to understand when, where, and how things went wrong. Maria’s ambles through Paris in Mandrax’s company, shot in bright, autumnal yellows and oranges, are intercut with black-and-white flashes to her past with Onassis and excerpts of her stage performances, set up to emphasize the difference between the weakness of her current voice and what it used to be. One memory is particularly disturbing: when she was a young girl in Athens, she and her sister performed for the pleasure of SS soldiers, who—it’s implied—also paid their mother to have sex with them. Though Larraín aims to dodge the usual constraints of the biopic by avoiding narratives that begin in obscurity, progress through notoriety, and end in death, here he succumbs to one of its traps: in the days before her death, Maria’s memories serve to explain her present state.
Because Maria is aware that she is about to die—she says things like “I don’t want to go just yet,” and “I’m in command of the end,” and implies in a number of ways that forced retirement for her might as well be death—and because she spends her last week thinking about her life, and perhaps most of all because she takes a truly astounding volume of Quaaludes, the viewer would be forgiven for assuming that she died by her own hand. According to her obituary, Maria died of a heart attack at age 53—though many were suspicious of the unusual urgency with which her body was cremated, before an autopsy could be conducted.
Is it fair for Larraín to suggest, however subtly, that his Maria wanted to die? The movie locates an affecting tension between her death drive and her will to rescue her voice, which is also her will to live. Rumors that La Callas is planning a comeback to the stage flourish as Maria rehearses with a trusted pianist. He doesn’t spare her feelings—her voice is weak—but he is gentle and encouraging: “I just felt La Callas in this room. We just have to keep trying,” he tells her after another difficult day. Maria’s greatest and final ambition, she tells the pianist, is to sing the “human song”—not a human song, but the human song, the same way we refer to the blackbird song. By giving her clear goals, no matter how tangible—restoring her voice or capturing in song the entirety of human experience—Larraín puts more faith in Maria than he ever did in Jackie or Diana. He is finally interested not only in the surface of what she represents but in how she might be an active participant in that representation: in order to be La Divina, Callas had to sing, and sing she did. Larraín often captures Jackie and Diana’s sorrowful expressions in close-ups, but their faces, however compelling, can only telegraph so much when there’s no depth to sustain them. Crying, despairing—these things didn’t make Jackie or Diana who they were. By contrast, when Maria’s face fills the screen, she is singing—which is what made her who she was.
Maria (Pablo Larraín, 2024).
Watching Maria in a cinema, the sheer size of Jolie’s face on screen, the scope of her beauty, is striking to the point of astonishment. It seems to entrance Larraín as well; right after Bruna and Ferruccio’s vigil over Maria’s dead body, we see a sharp black-and-white close-up of her singing face. In the context of her death, the music acquires an eerie quality, as if she were singing to us from beyond. In Leos Carax’s musical Annette (2021),a fictional primadonna, Ann (Marion Cotillard), sings about her need to die every night in order to save her audience. The stakes for the sopranos are existential, and eventually, Maria sings with such power that she dies. Barefoot in her nightgown, Maria imagines the presence of an orchestra and sings in front of her window. Her voice is finally strong enough to reach beyond the apartment and out to the street below, where Bruna and Ferruccio—who had gone out for coffee and croissants—join an improvised audience of passersby. The city, which had throughout the movie been alive with activity, stands still, in quiet reverence. Like Diana’s drive home to London with her boys, it’s as if there’s suddenly air to breathe, then to sing. As it turns out, this is Maria’s last gasp; when the music stops, she collapses.
What separates Callas from Kennedy, Princess Diana, and even Zelda Fitzgerald is that performance was not abstract for her; it was not a code of existence nor a means to hold on to power. Performance was Maria’s life work—it sustained her both spiritually and materially. One of her many contributions to the opera stage was to foreground her commitment to acting as well as to vocal technique. In 1969, she played the titular character in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea—about a woman whose mighty will was of mythical proportions. If Jackie was a symbol of grief and Diana was a victim of stifling tradition, Maria was mostly herself. At least, she was a version of herself: the one she wanted us to know through her music. Her persona might have protected her private self in any number of ways, like Jackie’s funeral veil or Zelda Fitzgerald’s extravagant flapperdom. But ultimately, it’s the construction of the myth, more than the myth itself, that opens a window into the life.
- Nancy Milford, Zelda (Harper Collins, 1970), 92. ↩