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Callas Forever

2002, Movie, NR, 108 mins

Callas Forever: Review

CALLAS FOREVER
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Director Franco Zeffirelli's intense, 20-year friendship with celebrated opera star Maria Callas — whose magnificent displays of artistic temperament should shame today's vulgar pretenders to divatude — inspired this poky, oddly uninvolving fiction spun around her lonely last days. Paris, 1977: Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons), in town to produce a concert by a Sex Pistols-like punk band called Bad Dreams and in the midst of a passionate flirtation with a much younger painter named Michael (Jay Rodan), receives disturbing news from an old friend, English journalist Sarah Keller (Joan Plowright). Callas (Fanny Ardant), Larry's client until the disastrous Japanese tour he produced at her behest sundered their relationship, has become a Norma Desmond-esque hostage to her own celebrated persona, rattling around her luxurious Paris apartment in mourning for her voice. Convinced that consumer video could open a new market for classical music and opera, Larry conceives a plan to revive Callas' career and coax the 53-year-old recluse out of her self-imposed prison of pills, nostalgia and regret. Though her legendary soprano is indeed ravaged, Callas remains beautiful, vital and passionately charismatic. Why not film her lip-syncing signature roles to recordings that capture her voice at its most glorious? Callas reluctantly agrees to Carmen, which she's recorded but never performed on stage. Larry hires a director (Manuel de Blas), invests his own capital and shepherds the project through production — neglecting Michael in the process — only to see it collapse under the weight of Callas' conviction that she's made a Faustian bargain that compromises her art. Callas' short, tempestuous life — she died of a heart attack in 1977, shortly after these imaginary events — contained the elements of true classical tragedy. The film only hints at the dramatic facts that fueled her legend, from her impoverished beginnings to the rigorous dieting that transformed dumpy duckling Sophie Cecilia Kalogeropoulos into an imperially slender swan to the tragic romance with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis that helped truncate her career. The glorious Ardant, who also played Callas on stage in Terrence McNally's Master Class, glides imperiously through the film on a chic cloud of Chanel frocks and frippery. But Zeffirelli's slight "what if...?" tale reduces the diva to a petulant drama queen d'un certain age throwing herself a world-class pity party, hardly an introduction likely to convert unbelievers to the cult of Callas. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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