DAY 2

Venice Film Festival: Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches

Ave Maria! Pablo Larraín caps a trilogy in thrall to “famous women on the verge” with Maria, his biopic on the iconic soprano Maria Callas. The latest to premiere on the Lido, following Jackie (on Jackie Kennedy) and Spencer (on a Princess Diana coming into her prime), Angelina Jolie is very comfortable in the eponymous role, with Larraín attaining a natural unity of performer, subject matter, and tone.

We can also slot this film in a more generic category: that of the awards season-ready Oscar vehicle, custom-tooled to appeal to voters across the technical and performance branches of the Academy, and providing a patina of prestige, yet nothing too demanding or unapproachable. Yet if Larraín doesn’t strike out of these confines, and you can also doubt his absolute passion for the subject at hand, suspecting a more pragmatic reason to take this project, he still makes intelligent decisions, and allows us to care about a character whose ego and concerns might not be readily identifiable.

These films revel in having famous people play famous people, and Jolie is almost effortlessly good, her own celebrity persona and regal, unearthly beauty merging with and standing in for Callas’s unique gifts. You felt him working under the sign of Paul Thomas Anderson, and Kubrick, respectively in Jackie and Spencer, yet here the more Europhilic Visconti and Fassbinder are apt stylistic templates. And the opening sting feels inspired by Amour: a flash forward in an airy, luxuriously high-ceilinged city apartment where we glimpse Callas’s lifeless body from afar, heart failure taking her at age 53.

Maria is a convincing character study and psychological unravelling; Steven Knight’s screenplay is perceptive on how living a life dedicated to sublimity in art impinges upon the self, and how we negotiate our demons and memories when the end is near. If you’re as uninformed (yet curious, I must say) about opera as I am, you can learn the roots of the common adjective “operatic”: the tragic destinies and inner turmoil of the roles she incarnated from Puccini and Bellini, are fully embodied in how Jolie mimes singing, and creates a realistic illusion from her posture and gentle wobbles.

With her bevy of health problems - including implied mental afflictions that Knight cautiously declines to name - the story’s ticking clock is provided by the intimation of what’s to come, and Callas sees fit to metaphorically “write” an autobiography, composed in a series of monologues to her meds, personified by Kodi Smit-McPhee as a documentary filmmaker. As said, Larraín directs more subtly than in Spencer, with guile and judicious stabs of magic realism, but he seems to be on assignment to make the most competent and presentable version of Maria, and not the richest version. A Maria Callas film hagiography would inevitably be made; let’s be glad it mostly attains perfect pitch.

_______________________________________________________

A more profitably unstable affair is Kill the Jockey, Argentine up-and-comer Luis Ospina’s follow-up to his Cannes selection El Angel, and the second film to premiere in competition today. With an unpredictable plot, and characters whose identities shape-shift accordingly, it’s a fashionably queer twist on some familiar underworld genre tropes, taking in the collapse of the conventional gender binary, but even more riskily, an offbeat approach to sexual fetishism.

Ospina’s previous feature was produced by Pedro Almodóvar’s production house, but this work seems to have internalised his influence even more thoroughly. The big-eyed and lithe-bodied Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is Remo, a star jockey imprisoned in what seems like a cult by the gangster Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho) - the reason being that he impregnates all his female jockeys himself. After Remo - who is uncomfortable in his skin for reasons we learn, and addicted to cocaine - accidentally kills a valuable racehorse, Sirena has had enough of his antics, and sets hitman to kill him.

Remo uses this to his advantage, fully neutralising his former captors, and then assumes the transfeminine identity Dolores in the film’s second half, which we also learn was his gender preference prior to his career under Sirena. This development also pleasingly changes the film’s own identity from a Latin American quasi-Guy Ritchie caper, to a more sombre meditation on how we strive and suffer to find a more authentic self. And thinking about the sexual innuendo and double entendres with which is profession is often associated, we can comprehend the life-giving buzz, the sensuality and thrill of taboo that Rémo finds in his métier. But, only if you want to see it that way.