Callas Forever

By 1977 (as the movie begins) Maria C. had become very much an icon, so the movie's emphasis on her large gay following is defensible I suppose, though Jeremy Irons' paramour is simply too good-looking for the part.

There was a film called Beethoven's Nephew a few years ago with a similar issue. Serious problem arise with casting attractive males in movies when they really have no qualities apart from their looks.

The Jeremy Irons character is a promoter who comes up with a thoroughly whacked-out idea for making money off the diva in what would turn out to be the last year of her life. He talks her into it -- re-staging Carmen for a movie and having her lip-sync to a tape made 20 years before -- and what we see produced is certainly knock-down gorgeous (Zefferelli directed this, after all), but still it is an absurd humiliation for the woman. Fortunately she comes to her senses at the end and gets the film quashed. (All this really happened, incidentally.) But the whole experience saves her life, in a sense, bringing her out of wasted years of drugs and a curtained existence in an elegant Paris apartment, to an acceptance of her age and an understanding of her place in high musical culture.

Fanny Ardant doesn't really look like Callas in the movie, though in the promotional stills she seems to. She can certainly act though, and makes an archetypal larger-than-life woman believable and thoroughly sympathetic. Joan Plowright is miscast, but the movie is strong enough to bury the memory of her part. There are scenes involving a board of directors that are just peculiar; apparently there is a parallel universe out there where corporate boards meet at the top of tall buildings to talk about the investment opportunities of aging opera stars. Fortunately those sequences are brief.

Some very nice touches appear having to do with Aristotle Onassis, who arguably destroyed the greatest opera singer in the 20th century, then dumped her. Coming to understand the depth of that betrayal is a painful undercurrent for Callas in the film.

For me one of the most intriguing scenes has to do with a handful of master classes Callas gave in New York at the very end of her life. I don't remember why, but I had a recording of some of them several years ago, lost now, alas. They were notable mainly for the uncanny perfection of Callas's examples when she would sing bits of arias for the students, following some young voice's painful attempt at the same piece. In one of the class's recreations in the film, while very brief, Callas-as-teacher rises to the kind of intellectual and emotional profundity that one-in-a-million teachers ever achieve. I was simply knocked out. Fanny Ardant does her very best work here, and the sequence is the emotional high-point of the film. I had tears in my eyes during the scene, something that usually nothing less than a hobbit will inspire in me.

The very end of the film is moving and utterly satisfying -- bittersweet, tragic, beautiful, more Puccini than Verdi.

Gallic actress Fanny Ardant is an inspired choice to play Maria Callas, and with her uncanny physical and likely temperamental resemblance, she plays the legendary soprano with real brio and scenery-chewing style. I would not have expected anything less in such a fanciful telling of a what-if scenario that sprouted out of director Franco Zeffirelli's fertile imagination. Zeffirelli is no stranger to the extravagant and visually resplendent as he helmed the Burtons-at-play 1967 "The Taming of the Shrew" and the much-beloved, age-appropriate 1968 version of "Romeo and Juliet". His long-time professional relationship with Callas provides the basis for this fantasy where in 1977, she is drawn out of self-imposed exile and into the limelight one last time by a fictitious concert promoter, Larry Kelly, who had long ago decided to forego opera for the more lucrative world of punk rock. Sporting a silly ponytail, Jeremy Irons portrays Kelly as a predictably irascible character who mercurially worships and degrades her as the circumstance dictates, a variation on the character he would play in "Being Julia". This time, his character is gay, of course, probably to avoid any element of romance that would detract from Callas' obsession with preserving her legacy.

Kelly's idea is to film her while acting out famous operatic roles on a sound stage and lip-synching the words, whereupon sound engineers would graft her recordings of some 22 years earlier onto the sound track. The series is to be called "Callas Forever" and starts with Bizet's "Carmen". After a rapid series of contrived scenes that resuscitate Callas from her Paris apartment seclusion back to international press attention, the film finally catches fire with the scenes that create the opera production itself. This is where Zeffirelli really shines as he makes Ardant look and act strikingly like Callas at her most passionate and charismatic. She is, of course, adored by her colleagues (in particular, an admiring young tenor playing Don Jose, as embodied by Gabriel Garko) and seems on the brink of a renaissance. Alas, it is the completion of this production that inspires Zeffirelli, along with co-writer Martin Sherman, to take the plot to the height of soap opera banality. Basking in her newly reborn confidence, Callas wants to take on Puccini's "Tosca" with her real voice, an idea supported blindly by Kelly but rejected by her backers. Instead of being crushed, she seems resigned to her legacy and insists that her "Carmen" be destroyed as she deems it a fraud.

That she comes to this realization after the fact is one of the central conceits of the film since it implies she has been cavalier about the efforts around her who did believe in her, but I suppose that is what diva behavior is all about. After all, at the beginning, Callas is portrayed as a pill-popper who feels sorry for herself as a has-been, her voice shot during an infamous tour in Japan, and as the rejected paramour of Aristotle Onassis, who cast her aside to marry Jackie Kennedy. Throughout the movie, she is haunted by her former voice with ghostly visions of her stage triumphs. These kinds of excesses seem appropriate to this kind of tribute film, but it all feels so predictably over-the-top. Sadly, Joan Plowright stereotypically plays a music journalist as a wisecracking, truth-bearing confidante that Thelma Ritter would have played with greater aplomb in the fifties. There is a persistent clunkiness to Zeffirelli and Sherman's screenplay and an overall lack of subtlety that can only be blamed on Zeffirelli's heavily ornate, Baroque film-making style. The DVD is short on extras as there is no audio commentary track, but it does include a brief making-of featurette, additional interview excerpts with Zeffirelli and the principal players and several trailers including the one for the movie.

Beautifully acted, intelligently written and criminally neglected by critics and distributors (it wasn't even released in the UK or USA) Callas Forever is a haunting and poignant study of the sacrifices an artist makes for her art. The director Franco Zeffirelli based much of it on his own 25-year friendship with the lady herself. Still, this is anything but a straightforward biopic. In a fictional story set during the last few months of the diva's life, Zeffirelli plays a tantalising game of "What if..?"

It's the spring of 1977, and Maria Callas - the world's most famous opera star - is now a recluse in Paris. A tragic cross between Garbo and Norma Desmond, she spends her life popping pills, fighting off bad dreams and listening to recordings of her voice at its glorious peak. Fanny Ardant does a stunning impersonation of the Callas voice and mannerisms. She even looks uncannily like her (apart from the odd awkward shot where she looks like Nana Mouskouri!) But her private hell is disrupted by the arrival of an old friend...

Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons) is a flamboyant gay impresario, complete with pony-tail! He's just had the brainwave of matching recordings of Callas in her prime with movie versions of her greatest opera hits. First up is Carmen, and this film-within-a-film (a riot of dancing gypsies, dashing matadors and floating lace mantillas) is easily the highlight of the show. We also get not one but two tragic love stories - Maria's unrequited passion for a hunky young tenor (Gabriel Garko) and Larry's doomed affair with a cute young painter (Jay Rodan).

At the end, Larry and Maria sit on a park bench and muse on how they have Sacrificed Their Lives For Their Art. Was it worth it? When the final result is as touching and lyrical as Callas Forever...well, most definitely, yes. Provided, of course, the public gets a chance to see it!

CALLAS FOREVER is a beautifully written, tenderly directed and acted tribute to the immortal Maria Callas by a man who knew her as well as anyone - Franco Zeffirelli. The fantasy of placing Callas on film for posterity in the last year of her life, the year she died of heart failure, when her voice was gone but her artistry remained is the means by which Zeffirelli memorializes the Diva and in every way he succeeds.

The year is 1977 and Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant) is in seclusion in her Paris apartment, grieving over 1) her beloved Aristotle Onassis who left her for Jacqueline Kennedy and then died and 2) her disastrous farewell concert in Japan which ended her magnificent career with a flop. No longer able to sing she lives in the past, listing to her old recordings and taking pills. Only her constant maid Bruna (Anna Lelio) is allowed to comfort her with occasional visits from her warm-hearted publicist Sarah Keller (Joan Plowright).

In Paris for the promotion of a punk group Bad Dreams is Larry Kelley (Jeremy Irons) who has just met and bedded a young artist Michael (Jay Rodan): Kelley had been Callas' agent in her heyday and Michael has been creating paintings inspired by her recordings. Seeing Michael's obsession over Callas whom he has never seen perform forces Kelley to visit Callas, their devotion to each other is 'rekindled' and Kelley proposes a film version of Callas not only to bring her out of her depression but to capitalize on the fact that present and future generations should have a filmed account of the penultimate opera singer of the 20th century.

Callas is recalcitrant at first, not wanting to produce a fraudulent film made using her old recordings dubbed onto the sound track of a current staging, but she finally resolves her hesitancy by granting the filming of 'Carmen', a role she recorded but never played on the stage. Thus the project is launched and Callas is revitalized and happy again, being satisfied with the miracle of technology that allows her to invest her energies in the acting of Carmen while consenting to lip-synch to her old recordings. She even has a say in the casting of the other roles, especially Don Jose - Marco (a very hunky Gabriel Garko, a former model and Mr. Italy!). She retains her temper tantrums and demands for perfection that hallmarked her real career, doing her own dancing, having a say about costumes, etc.

The film is eventually finished and the result is magnificent. There is even some intrigue when Marco shows more than a little interest in her (a hint of the Strauss Marshallin/Octavian encounter). But alas at the end of the film Callas is forced to admit that her youth cannot be regained and decides the film is a 'fraudulent work' is not compatible with her life's devotion to truth in music. She asks Kelley to destroy it. How these two come to grips with their individual lives (Kelley's Michael has left him and he is once again as alone as Callas) is finessed by one of the most tender endings on film.

Fanny Ardant is a miracle as Callas: she inhabits her physically, understands Callas' facial features as she lip-synchs her operas, and seems to be a reincarnation of the Diva. Jeremy Irons gives one of the finest performances of his rich career as the aging gay agent and Joan Plowright adds just the right amount of lightness and grace as Sarah Keller - wise, acerbic, yet supportive of both Callas and Kelley. The scenes of Paris are correctly nostalgic: the sets for 'Carmen' by Carlo Centolavigna create a gold standard for all future true productions of 'Carmen'. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent.

Zeffirelli has succeeded in giving us a memorial to Maria Callas and for that the opera world will be forever grateful. The passages of the many arias used in this film are among the finest versions Callas recorded. Everything about this work is brilliant and it deserves the widest audience possible. Grady Harp

Fanny Ardant play very well a difficult role. Maria Callas had a strong personality and the Zeffirelli's work helps to understand the psychology of a woman at the end of the career searching for her tranquillity. In my opinion this movie is the dream of a friend of Maria Callas that wanted the singer return to the scene after the end of an incredible voice. The friend is Franco Zeffirelli. The last words of Maria/Fanny in the movie let to understand Maria Callas never wanted to accept the Zeffirelli's propose to come back to the scene even in different way.