'Don't sing, scream. Scream so loud that Puccini can hear. Scream so loud that ugly old Onassis can die crooked and hear'.
Angelina Jolie had a great transformation with the character of the same name in the movie - Maria - Photo: IMDb
The musical partner speaks to opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín's biopic Maria when she, in her final years, expresses her desire to return to the stage.
Angelina Jolie's face as Maria is hidden in the dark, her eyes sunken.
Maria never listens to her records.
In Larraín's work about Princess Diana, there is also a scene where she stands in a gloomy castle, her face turned away from the light and darkness takes over her sunken eyes.
Even earlier, he recreated Jackie Kennedy's sunken eyes as she returned home, changed out of her bloody clothes, and thought about John F. Kennedy's funeral.
Larraín's trilogy goes into that forbidden zone in the minds of graceful and insecure women, the more glorious and glittering the facade, the more isolated they are inside, with more suffering and less escape.
They are constantly seen walking around the house, as if walking through the same mind they have walked through a million times. Pablo Larraín's Maria always lives inside herself: her castle-like apartment, her music, her memories, her hallucinations.
Maria Callas was of Greek origin. The Greeks thought a lot about death. Greek philosophy, which also began with Socrates, began with the belief that "philosophy is a preparation for death."
When death approaches, people want to find a foothold for their disintegrating lives. Maria never listens to her records, because they are too perfect and music should not be perfect.
But in her final days, she turned on that perfection to listen to. The records - which would live on even after she had died a hundred years, which would remain forever to fill her absence, she would never sing as perfectly as when she recorded these records - perhaps more than anyone else she understood that if she was immortal in the eyes of her fans, it was because those moments of time had been preserved.
Angelina Jolie during a photo shoot for the movie "Maria" - Photo: Reuters
It seems that now, it is the forever great recordings that will be the real Maria Callas in the eyes of most audiences, and the real Maria Callas who cannot hit the high notes as she once did is only a shadow from the past.
But the opera still killed her with his own hands.
To resist her perfect past is to live, the only support for life. Maria wanted to return to the stage only because of the praise of the chef who had taken care of her for so many years, who knew nothing about opera, who she knew would always praise her no matter how she sang.
She stopped singing because she was no longer perfect; and now she sings because she knows she is no longer perfect. She insisted on singing even when the doctor said that if she sang, she would die. The scene of her singing alone in her apartment in the middle of Paris, and below the passers-by who happened to hear and looked up at the singer's house, reminds us of the scene of a crowd suddenly seeing the Virgin Mary.
No one can record that imperfect song, it only exists in a moment, but in its impermanence and imperfection, life is singing its triumphant beauty before life is defeated by death.
At the beginning of Maria, we see Maria Callas walking towards a medical stretcher and singing Verdi's Ave Maria. It is a different Ave Maria than the familiar Ave Maria by Schubert.
Although the movie Maria was not highly rated, Angelina Jolie's performance still made a big impression on many critics - Photo: IMDb
Verdi's music is from the opera Otello based on Shakespeare's original, where the faithful wife Desdemona prays for the miserable like herself, but despite that, she is still killed by her husband Otello.
It is revealed later that in this scene Maria is actually singing her own funeral oration.
She died singing alone in her Paris apartment, knowing that with her failing health, music would be her death sentence. She loved opera so much, considered opera her life, her only eternal marriage, but opera still killed her with its own hands.
Was it a tragedy? Perhaps. But it's hard to imagine Maria wanting anything else to take her life.
The whole film is built as Maria's vision of herself, the person who follows the camera and talks to her is Mandrax, an illusion, a personification of the sedative-hypnotic drug she takes every day.
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/maria-va-ao-thi-cua-mot-danh-ca-20241222090200932.htm
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