Grief in Maria has a different aftertaste. It’s deeper, less acrid. The film closes out Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s thematic trilogy of feminine horrors, portraits of the rubbled dreams of women who walked the 20th century’s most privileged halls. Jackie’s monstrous climax splattered the blood of President Kennedy across his wife’s pale pink suit, as worn by Natalie Portman; Spencer sent Kristen Stewart’s Diana stumbling down the halls of Sandringham estate, nauseous, her body possessed by the foul, inescapable stench of duty.
Here, violence and possession make way for the haunted. Maria is the softer, more restrained film – less immediately striking, perhaps, but still deeply emotive. It invokes the last days of Maria Callas, “La Divina” of opera, as played by Angelina Jolie. She was striking in her beauty and formidable on stage, able to command her passions like a battalion, with a voice that seemed to swell up from somewhere deep in the earth.
