There's Plenty to Sing About in 'Maria' and 'Emilia Pérez'

Angelina Jolie looks stunning as opera legend Maria Callas, but the movie doesn’t rise to the level of the music. Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

This season, Netflix makes its bid for awards with larger-than-life diva figures and a whole lot of singing. Pablo Larraín, maker of the irreverent biopics Jackie and Spencer, brings us his take on a third 20th-century icon: Maria, as in Callas, played by no less than Angelina Jolie. Also tuneful is Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, a musical with a contemporary setting that made a stir at the Cannes Film Festival and scored 10 Golden Globe nominations. Both are currently streaming.

Emilia Pérez gets points for expanding the boundaries of the musical. If The Umbrellas of Cherbourg took place in modern Mexico and involved drug cartels and a chorus of doctors and nurses crooning about vaginoplasty, it might be a little like this.

Let’s back up. Karla Sofía Gascón plays a feared cartel leader who is transgender and wants to live openly as a woman named Emilia Pérez. Zoe Saldana is the overworked, cynical lawyer she hires to arrange her gender confirmation surgery and fake the death of her former identity. All goes to plan, the two women become friends, and Emilia launches a foundation to fight the gang violence in which she once participated. But she misses her wife (Selena Gomez) and her two children, who believe her dead. So she invites them to live with her, posing as the cousin of the husband and father they remember. Various misunderstandings result from this deception, some cute and some tragic.

The belief-stretching scenario puts a modern spin on old Hollywood “women’s pictures.” It’s easy to imagine Pedro Almodóvar playing Emilia’s story for camp value, using it to comment wryly on our expectations about gender. (His 1987 Law of Desire combined melodrama with a sympathetic portrait of a trans woman, albeit played by a cis actress.) But Audiard, who adapted the story to film from his own operetta and Boris Razon’s novel, seems to take Emilia Pérez more seriously. He milks the pathos of Emilia’s situation — as, for instance, one of her kids wonders in song why this stranger smells and feels so familiar.

Emilia Pérez is a mixed bag, to put it mildly. The performances are mostly good, with Gascón commanding the screen with her charisma and Saldana showing an impressive range. The musical numbers by Camille and Clément Ducol are usually catchy, sometimes touching, sometimes electrifying.

But the plotting and characterization are all over the place, with an opportunistic quality suggestive of a soap opera. In the second half, Gomez prances around like a troublemaker on a Bravo reality show, while Saldana is relegated to the status of Greek chorus. As for Emilia, we never get deep enough inside her head and heart to form a solid interpretation of scenes in which she appears to revert to aspects of her former identity. The movie presents her as a titillating conundrum — how can someone who committed so much harm now do so much good? — without exploring her as a person. Gascón does her best, but the script isn’t strong enough to support her.

If Emilia (the character) is sometimes in diva mode, Maria (character and movie) always is. Like Larraín’s other biopics, this one focuses on a small but revelatory slice of time: the last year of opera singer Maria Callas’ life. Having lost her matchless soprano voice, the 53-year-old lives in a palatial Paris apartment with her loyal butler, maid and poodles. She spends her time popping pills, dreaming of her late love, Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and stepping out in public for an occasional ego boost. As she puts it, “I go to restaurants to be adored.”

Almost every line of Steven Knight’s screenplay is in that vein, and Jolie delivers them as if Callas were always onstage at La Scala. Asked, “What did you take?” (as in pills), she replies airily, “I took liberties all my life, and the world took liberties with me.” When Callas proclaims, “There is no life away from the stage,” she means it. Only in a brief flashback to her early years in Greece and a scene with her sister (Valeria Golino) do we see a more natural side of her.

Visually, Maria is an irresistible French pastry, with Edward Lachman’s fine cinematography highlighting the delicate pink florals and glowing jewel tones. Plot-wise, it’s a series of soundbites, more diva playbook than full-fledged drama. Egged on by an ambitious conductor, Callas dreams of recovering her voice to sing for herself alone. She hallucinates encounters with a young documentarian (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in which she polishes her mythos and prepares for a death she almost seems to welcome.

But mostly Callas is just in a very picturesque funk. Her inertia contrasts with black-and-white flashbacks to highlights of her career, during which Jolie lip-syncs to arias that every opera fan knows by heart. The performance is fine, but the real Callas’ voice is in another realm of heartbreaking expressiveness, so these scenes just leave us wanting more.

Maria doesn’t take as many risks as Spencer, Larraín and Knight’s previous collaboration. It’s an easy film to sink into — the vibe is impeccable, as the kids say — but we emerge wanting to know all the juicy details about Callas that this movie leaves out.

Both of these films are about embracing and incarnating an exaggerated version of womanhood. Their heroines revel in the diva role, sometimes to a self-destructive degree. But neither film really breaks down the recipe for a diva’s potent cocktail of power and vulnerability. Sometimes being fabulous isn’t enough.