Inside a Paris café in 1977 sits Maria Callas. Or, rather, sits Angelina Jolie, playing the worldwide opera legend in the 2024 film Maria. The distinction is important, as this scene makes clear. The café in which Maria sits is ornate, yet empty of people—except for the bartender and, at one point, a television crew that the opera singer hallucinates. Such “dreams,” Maria admits, are taking over her life. Then, she quizzes the bartender on why he is so kind. He responds by putting on a record; suddenly, Maria’s own voice—recorded many years earlier—pours into the empty café. Now, the singer’s demeanor dramatically changes. “A record is perfect,” she objects. “And a song should never be perfect. It should be performed.”

With these few words, the actor breaks the uncanny illusion for which biopics strive. After all, this film is the perfect record that Callas herself denounces; moreover, her art form was itself grounded not in recordings, but, of course, performance. Here, the film itself is warning you: No matter how beautifully shot, Jolie sitting at a table is not Maria Callas.

That disjunction becomes even more apparent—or, more precisely, audible—when the film’s Maria attempts to regain her lost voice. To tell this story, director Pablo Larraín cast an actor with no vocal training to mimic an opera singer who had lost her voice struggling to regain it. Jolie prepared for the role by taking seven months of opera lessons, and Larraín estimates that the singing in the rehearsal room is up to 60 percent Jolie. During these scenes, the soundtrack mixes together Jolie’s live voice with Callas’s recorded one; their differences are magnified through cuts between, on the one hand, clearly fictionalized shots of Jolie rehearsing and, on the other hand, shots that recreate Callas’s legendary stage performances.

Instead of amazing the viewer with Jolie’s ability to reembody a once-in-a-generation artist, Maria asserts that such an effort is doomed to fail. Callas’s voice was derided as “ugly,” but it was also exceptional: Because of her dramatic intelligence, muscular power, and technical agility in moving across scales and trilling notes, she was almost uniquely capable of bringing the finest gradations of her complex heroines’ passions to life. But because of her failing health, her voice ended up failing her.

By focusing on the 53-year-old Callas’s attempt to recover the voice that her body is no longer capable of producing, Maria makes the audience share its heroine’s grief for live performance. As such, the film is a timely intervention into a cultural moment defined by autotune and photoshop. (The film’s daring approach to the genre might be why Larraín’s evocative storytelling and Jolie’s deeply researched yet viscerally human performance got snubbed with this year’s Oscars nominations.) To activate this grief, the film recognizes the archival documentation that keeps female genius from being forgotten, while admitting that this documentation cannot replace the artist’s living body.

To grant recognition to Callas’s genius, Maria has few precedents within the biopic genre to draw on. While men-centered biopics privilege beginnings, women-centered biopics tend to narrate the tragic end of their subjects.

The biopics typically fêted during awards season tend to focus on the early years of a male artist or inventor’ career, where genius overcomes adverse social circumstances and silences industry naysayers (Ray [2004, dir. Taylor Hackford], Walk the Line [2005, dir. James Mangold], Steve Jobs [2015, dir. Danny Boyle]). Consider the climax of A Complete Unknown (2024, dir. James Mangold), which racked up far more nominations and awards than Maria this winter. Bob Dylan’s literally electric performance of new material at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival causes the audience to riot and his patrons to fume, but anyone with a passing knowledge of music history (or simply an ear for good music) knows that “Like a Rolling Stone” is actually a triumph. And in case you didn’t, the ending title card reminds you that Dylan went on to become the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The women featured in biopics, meanwhile, are only interesting—it seems—because of their deaths. Take the 1989 biopic The Karen Carpenter Story (dir. Joseph Sargent and Richard Carpenter), which begins with the 32-year-old singer’s unconscious body being loaded onto a gurney. And while the Oscar-winning 2019 biopic Judy (dir. Rupert Goold) may not start with Garland’s death, the film focuses on Garland popping pills and chugging liquor to make it through what will end up being her final stage performances. It is true that focusing on a female heroine’s tragic end can highlight the gendered social circumstances that prevented her career from achieving the longevity it deserved. Still, such a focus risks turning the female artist from a figure of admiration into an object of pity or even disgust.

Perhaps the discrepancy lies in what source material filmmakers have to work with. Steve Jobs and A Complete Unknown are based on books that tirelessly document their subjects’ early career, but the stories about female celebrities that sell often focus on scandal and tragedy. Callas is no exception. Callas revived opera by bringing a thrilling dramatic intensity to the art form, but she is most remembered for leaving her husband to be Aristotle Onassis’s mistress, only to be jilted when he married Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy without even telling her. Callas’s career never revived after the Onassis affair, enabling her life to be read as a parable for how a woman’s dedication to her artistry is no match for the power that men have over her.

High-profile biographies of Callas tend to focus on this part of the story, and in so doing, they get farther rather than closer to the truth of their subject. Take, for example, a recent biography that repeats the rumor that Callas became pregnant by Aristotle Onassis and even claims that her husband blackmailed her because of it. The claim is dutifully supported by a footnote, citing a letter Callas wrote to her good friend Leo Lerman. But examine the actual letter—housed at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library—and you’ll find that the original document provides no context for Callas’s complaint, “I wish I had dropped the blackmailer of a husband before!” (instead, she only teases her friend that “When I see you I’ll tell you all!”). Other biographies don’t even include footnotes. The competing and misleading accounts of Callas’s life thus pose a problem for the filmmaker looking to commemorate her genius. “I read nine biographies …” Larraín admitted, “and still I have no idea who [Callas] was.”

To overcome this problem, Maria cuts through the rumors propagated by tabloids and biographers by engaging directly with primary sources.

Maria might reject records for being “perfect,” but Maria fastidiously recreates archival recordings. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Ed Lachman explained that he and Larraín “benefitted from the fact that Maria Callas’s life was heavily documented” in home videos, professional recordings, and magazine portraits, and this material is dutifully recreated in the film’s first few minutes. After opening with a shot of Jolie’s Callas’s corpse, Maria cuts to black and dramatically shifts to a very different kind of storytelling. Intercut with close-ups of Jolie lipsyncing to Callas’s recording of “Ave Maria” is footage of Jolie that recreates photographs and video footage instantly recognizable to Callas fans. Jolie as Callas looking out her window at the Paris Ritz at the Place Vendôme. The curtain rising on Callas’s Paris debut at Palais Garnier, now with Jolie at the center. Jolie as Callas in an austere black turtleneck, photographed by Beaton. Even viewers unfamiliar with Callas can recognize that this is recreated footage because of Lachman’s choice of period-appropriate lenses and film stock, which vary over the course of the sequence.

By opening with a fictionalized shot of the singer’s corpse only to deluge the viewer with material that recreates historical reality as closely as possible, Maria moves beyond its predecessors in the female biopic genre. Even while depicting a lovelorn diva’s drug-fueled downfall, Maria brilliantly complicates its own story: by opening up the possibility that any scenes that don’t recreate performance documentation are, in fact, a hallucination.

Fifteen minutes in, the butler Ferruccio asks Maria about whether the television crew she claims will be arriving is “real.” She responds: “As of this morning, what is real and what is not real is my business.” The crew she imagines is led by a young British journalist named Mandrax, the trade name for the quaaludes Maria is taking. As the film proceeds, his presence prompts Maria to reminisce about all the topics that tabloid readers pant for, such as the baby she was rumored to abort at Onassis’s demand. Biographers continue to debate how controlling Onassis was and what impact he had on Callas’s final years, and the device of the imaginary Mandrax allows Maria to cleverly put its answers to these questions in gigantic quotation marks.

Running alongside this narrative about Maria the tabloid obsession is a narrative about Callas the dedicated artist, and it’s this narrative that can be taken at face value. Surviving letters clearly establish that the studious Callas tried to regain her voice in her final years, and scenes portraying this effort directly engage with performance documentation by cutting between the 53-year-old Callas attempting to sing the arias that defined her repertoire and flashbacks to the stages where she performed them to enraptured audiences. Perfect recordings may not be identical to performance, but they do have referential value. Instead of impressing the viewer with an uncanny impersonation, Maria’s simulation of archival footage works to imbue the story of the soprano’s genius with greater reality than the myth of her private tragedy.

“Maria” shows how this documentation can be used to create a vivid and deeply informed interpretation of a performing artist’s work.

It’s this story that anchors the film. In the climax, the last rehearsal scene, Maria finally realizes she might never recover her voice. The stark difference between the thin, wobbly high notes that Jolie emits in the rehearsal room and the Callas recording that plays over shots of Jolie costumed as Anna Bolena at La Scala explains why Jolie’s body deflates into itself as her character realizes she can’t sing the aria anymore. The grief Jolie so vividly displays during the rehearsal scenes helps the audience share her understanding of what it must be like to inhabit a body that can no longer express artistic genius as it once could. Jolie’s acute awareness of the relationship between embodiment and operatic singing, expressed in so many interviews, allows the film to revise—for the better!—Callas’s legacy. And it is this that makes the film so remarkable and so unique within the genre of the female biopic.

Callas called the body the most “difficult” instrument. This is because, while the body’s powers of expression exceed anything nonhuman, these powers depend on factors that exceed the control of even the most disciplined and studious musicians like Callas. Mood. Weather. Wardrobe. And—most important in the case of the real-world Callas—health. Thus, Callas’s life is not a cautionary tale about how even the greatest female artists might end up alone and deranged because of the cruelty of powerful men. Instead, it’s a story about how artistic genius depends upon commanding an uncontrollable body.

That’s why a film like Maria couldn’t come at a more necessary time. Biopics have become one of the great prestige genres of the 21st century. At their best, they use an individual life to tell the story of an era (Oppenheimer [2023, dir. Christopher Nolan]), but more often, their chief interest lies in seeing one celebrity transform into another celebrity (Maestro [2023, dir. Bradley Cooper]). It’s no wonder biopics have come to predominate in a cultural moment defined by photoshop and autotune, where one thing can easily be made to simulate something else. Viewers—apparently—want to imagine that who they are seeing on screen really is the figure from history.

Such mimicry, however, is ultimately hollow. In point of fact, Jolie and Callas are not the same person; and this “nonidentity” is deliberately employed by Maria to remind us of a simple truth: You can’t reembody the dead.

Maria is so intellectually rich that it made me do something I never thought I’d do: concede that, yes, performance is defined by disappearance. This idea comes from Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, where she claims that “performance cannot be saved, recorded, [or] documented” because “once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” Like many theater scholars with a historical bent, I’ve dedicated my research to challenging this view by excavating all of the documentation that belongs to the performance event, from playbills that greeted audience members entering the theater to actors’ portraits they could buy at the refreshment bar.

Maria shows how this documentation can be used to create a vivid and deeply informed interpretation of a performing artist’s work. Still, the gap it creates between Jolie’s voice and Maria’s dramatizes the fact that that interpretation can never be identical to Callas’s dramatic impersonations. The artist and her body are no longer present.

Given the decline in attendance opera houses worldwide are experiencing, hopefully Maria will make other spectators recognize that mass media is no substitute for live performance. In interviews, Larraín and Jolie—one a lifelong operagoer, the other initially a novice—express their wish that a movie about Callas can help break down the barriers separating the public from an art form often presumed to be “elitist.” Crucially, those barriers aren’t necessarily financial. At as low as $32.50 per ticket, the Met’s family circle is half the price as the cheapest tickets to the latest Broadway smash; and even up there in the nosebleeds, the sound is beautiful.

Nor are those barriers necessarily intellectual. Elite critics faulted Callas for not hitting every note, for wobbling, for not disguising the stark contrasts between her different registers. But audiences didn’t care, because what she offered was something far more gratifying than the self-satisfaction of judging whether a singer hit such and such note in the score: experience of those forbidden passions and unresolved conflicts, which only an intensely embodied form like opera can dramatize so starkly.

This is what secured Callas’s status as the People’s Prima Donna, and what reminds us that you don’t need to be an expert to love opera. “Opera can be a very silly thing,” Callas told a British interviewer in 1957, but if a singer uses their voice in service of storytelling, “it can be the most gorgeous thing in the world.”

Callas dies at the end of Maria, but the film promises to give new life to an art form that, for me, exemplifies everything that our largely virtual mode of existence desperately needs. In place of detachment, opera overpowers your senses with the experience of another person’s pleasure or pain. In the film’s final scene, titled “An Ascent,” Maria brings about the heart attack that will kill her by disobeying her doctor’s orders and singing. Her choice of aria is Tosca’s “Vissi d’arte”—“I lived for art.” It’s an incredible performance from Jolie, clearly made possible by the fact that a 1964 telecast gives us direct insight into how Callas dramatized the aria onstage. There is the pain that makes Callas’s Tosca ask why her God has placed her in harm’s way; this morphs into the pain that makes Jolie’s Maria risk her life for art; and that pain, in turn, morphs into my own lamentation for the forces that have divested my life of the catharsis of live performance.

I left the cinema weeping over the fact that—like most Callas fans alive today—I will never be able to see her perform live. And yet, I’m grateful for that grief, because it made me want to escape our hypermediated world of screens by going to the Met as soon as I could travel to New York City, and see who will leap into the position of being the next great interpreter of opera’s thrillingly defiant heroines. 

Featured image: Angelina Jolie in Maria (2024), via IMDB.