Maria

She died on the 16th of September. The day before fiberoptic cabling started carrying calls between two telephone exchanges in Turin. A week later, Sony and Philips would publicly demonstrate 'laser sound'. The first is one of the building blocks of internet as we know it, the second the core technology of CDs. Each would profoundly change the way we consume music, but that wouldn't be visible for years, even decades. What mattered that day was that La Divina was gone.

Anchored in a strong central performance, using the contrasts between monochrome and colour to identify different time periods, and with a deliberate unreliability that finds something expressionistic beyond the mechanisms of film, there's an obvious parallel with Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. There are deeper similarities with Marjane Satrapi's Radioactive however, in particular that its subject is at once of Paris and somewhere else.

Angelina Jolie has more than enough star power to convince as the figure Leonard Bernstein called "the Bible of opera". Her capability as an actor allows her to be both delicate and diva, damaged and demanding. As her even younger self, Aggelina Papadopoulou ably handles a difficult task, but the film and Maria herself can find space to be kind to the one that came before. It's the same regard for self-regard that was one of many highlights in Luna Carmoon's Hoard.

I've mentioned directors before each film referenced above because Maria is very clearly a work by Pablo Larrain. He works again with Stephen Knight, as he did for Spencer. As a directing and writing team they've clearly got habits. It's one thing to make films with similarities, it's quite something to make two that feature haunting appearances by Anne Boleyn. It's the same actor who appears as JFK as in their earlier Jackie. Caspar Phillipson's sixth turn as 35th President puts him at risk of typecasting, though turns as Robert Redford and Josip Broz Tito do suggest charisma harnessed to wider purposes.

While Jolie's Maria is central, her bright burning candle is the flame to which any number of moths are drawn. As her devoted staff, Alba Rorhrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino demonstrate the quality that means they'll feel familiar faces even if you've only caught a percentage of their pictures. Valeria Golino utterly convinces with sisterly concern, especially as she might not even be in their one scene together. Haluk Bilginer's Aristotle Onassis embodies the notion of a rapine capitalist for whom matrimony is a marketplace and 'wife' is incomplete without the descriptor 'trophy'. That's on every stage, from bars to boats to a bed that owes more to Inception than any infirmary. The key figure in Maria's self that is immolation is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.

He is an interviewer, making a film within the film. A documentary, titled La Callas: The Last Days. She's given him complete access to her life, even her bloodstream. He goes by Mandrax, a name that might not be immediately familiar, but scholars of pharmaceutical genealogy will know his parents as Benadryl and Quaalude. It's his clapper-board that titles the film's four sections.

La Diva. (An) Important Truth. That one so important that it has a reprise, "mark it." Curtain Call. Obvious enough that Maria says herself "I'm guessing that this film of yours is almost over." An Ending. One that's paired with Brian Eno's track of the same name, making this another of many films that have re-used elements of what was originally intended for For All Mankind.

As with Oppenheimer and Radioactive, these sections are at once simultaneous and sequential. There is footage that might be home movies, and we'll later see their real inspirations. There is the past, in crisp black and white, and the present, in a rich technicolor that is as real as unreal can be. A choir at the Eiffel Tower, a later shot that's so pristine in its colours and clarity that it might not be a painting. A silent Turandot, an encroaching orchestra, concerts for ghosts, spectral choirs, and more, and more, and more.

"There is no reason in opera", but there is craft. Of film, undeniably, Edward Lachman's use of multiple mediums helps draw the distinctions between the thens that were and the thens that were not. The locations are lush, scatterings of statuary and recursive grandeur, the sweep of stalls and stages. Of sound as well, the grain of picture sometimes matched by the rustle of tape or other diegetic instrumentation. I lost count of how many orchestras were credited, topped out at perhaps 200 vocalists. That includes Jolie and Papadopoulou. That La Callas felt her voice no longer worked gives immaculate cover to quality. If ears more adept than mine could find fault then that might be the illness, might be her perception.

In an extended close-up that's a recurring motif in Larrain's work, Jolie sings as Maria, right at the opening. When she doesn't then sing, when she can't, or won't, or couldn't, that earlier performance is still there. As inescapable as fate.

For all that quality, and there's plenty, there are some places that ring a little false. A reference to 'fajitas' meant I spent longer than anyone else will trying to determine if there was anywhere in 1970s Paris that served them and then in an even deeper dive if anywhere in 1950s Mexico would have either. It's probably an attempt at Anglicisation. I doubt anyone but you or I would attempt to reconcile the traditions of gyros and al pastor (or taco de trompo) to make sense of one line in a film. That's enough to get heads spinning, rotating spit or not. More vexingly to those free from the pitta patter of pathology is similarity to Todd Phillips' Joker. There are moments where it seems the film doesn't trust its audience to know that what is real or unreal doesn't matter. Better two notes creating harmony or discord than to settle on one note that is flat.

Those cavils aside, it is gorgeous, both to look at and to listen to. It's perhaps Larrain's most accessible film, though that's as much to do with its star as its subject. There's a raft of musical biopics around, but this at least is trying something. I'd rather something that wasn't all there than something that reeks of survivor-exonerating hagiography. In a year with several strong performances it's Jolie who makes Maria soar, but the headwinds of competition might yet bring it low without any clumsiness clipping its wings.