Nonostante_This Italian drama is brave enough, bar a few little style mishaps here and there. I must admit, though, that Tóti Guðnason’s score was a bit disappointing. Tóti is a rising star in film music, and he can write music that is very, very beautiful: slab after slab of powerful sound that build a sense of epic beauty, but one whose role seems to be diminished by what we think is excessive dependance on existing songs. True, these songs are good and adorable and do a great job at defining and exalting several moments in the film, but we truly would have appreciated more prominence for Tóti Guðnason’s music.
A secure situation, away from the chaos and unpredictability of daily life, shielded from everything and everyone: the protagonist is a long-term patient who finds in the hospital routine a personal comfort zone, where resignation and apathy become freedom. The arrival of a ne...
After Jackie (2016), about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer (2021), dedicated to Princess Diana, the Chilean director returns to the Lido with the final chapter of a trilogy of biopics about women who made history. Angelina Jolie portrays the greatest opera singer...
Maria_When you make a movie on the life of an artist whose identity is one and the same with the very idea of diva, you either find a key to interpret her life in comprehensive manner (Todd Haynes’ take on Bob Dylan’s life shown in I’m Not There comes to mind) or the choice to make fiction work of it, a respectful, subservient work, will taste too much like mainstream. This is what I felt upon seeing Larraín’s film: it all fits together, analyses fall into place and everything, but there’s also that aftertaste of obvious orthodoxy – again, of mainstream, which we couldn’t say about Larraín’s previous works on Jackie Kennedy and Lady Diana. The latter two had an idea, a point of view about them. In Maria, we see what we had hoped not to all along: Maria Callas in her home, working on the arias that earned her the highest triumph, and on to seeing those nights at the theatre, in opera theatres all around the world, with Angelina Jolie as Anne Boleyn singing to the top of her lungs. This is beyond mainstream. This is, with all due respect, porn.
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