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Pablo Larrain’s Gilded Cage: Jackie, Spencer, and Maria

Images courtesy NEON, Searchlight, and Netflix.

One of the upcoming award’s season’s big contenders is Maria, Pablo Larrain’s biographical drama following the celebrated opera singer Maria Callas’s through the last week of her life, which she spent (according to the film) in somber but by no means sober reflection in her lavish Paris apartment, doted on by her long-suffering servants. Maria is an excellent film and for her performance as Callas, Angelina Jolie is strongly favorited for awards consideration, but I think the true resonances of Maria are only really fully appreciated in the context of Larrain’s other recent films. Maria is effectively the conclusion of a trilogy focusing on some of the most famous and objectified women of the 20th century: Jackie Bouvier in Jackie (starring Natalie Portman), Diana Spencer in Spencer (Kristen Stewart), and now Maria Callas. Each of these films explores the confinement, regret, and isolation each of these women feel as they are torn from their partners, stripped of their access to power and expression, and left in grief—for their loved ones and for themselves.

Though all three films are highly speculative in nature, Spencer is by far the most heavily fictionalized of them. It even introduces itself as a fairy-tale; it is after all, the story of a princess locked in a tower. The film takes as its stage the long Christmas weekend at Sandringham where Diana is steeling herself for a tortuous holiday with the in-laws, one governed by formalities, traditions and endless policing from the her watchful keepers. She is approaching the end of her leash and is looking to make a break for it, yet is hemmed in by obligation, expectation and justified paranoia.
When we first see Diana, she is lost and stops in at a roadside cafe to ask directions and the staff and patrons receive her as they might have done a unicorn that had strolled in from outside. In all three films we see how unnatural and uncomfortable all these women’s interactions with the public are. Jackie the least, the only real interaction she has with a member of the public is when she records a filmed tour of the White House for them and then when one of them shoots her husband off-screen, but the same point is made in the public voice’s absence.

Each of these women is haunted by a man. In Jackie it’s obviously her recently assassinated husband and in Maria it’s her departed husband Aristotle Onassis, whom Callas outlived by just two years. The outlier here is Diana, whose relationship with her husband, the present Charles, is embittered and ongoing. The film finds the two about to embark on their ugly public divorce, and so she is not haunted by Charlies, but by her father, the original “Spencer”. This is linked to the differing title format. The mononym by which the film’s subject is referred is not her Christian name, as with the other two films in this trilogy, but her maiden name. Partly this is due to public optics. These films serve to give us “the real” woman, and so the personal name is preferred. She is “Jackie” not first lady “Jackie Kennedy” or “Maria” and not “Maria Callas” the opera singer. But Diana was known to the public as “Diana”, and so screenwriter Steven Knight (who also wrote Maria making him an integral part of this cycle’s authorship), christened her by her maiden name, recalling both her late father and the woman she would still be if not for her marriage.

Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana
Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. Image: courtesy of NEON

Diana’s relationship to her father then is therefore implicitly one of freedom, as well as the past, family and death. Throughout the film, she receives psychic calls from her father, urging her away, away from this place where she cannot be herself. She sneaks away from the palace, to her boarded up old home, and prepares to throw herself down a flight of stairs, death seeming like the only form of defiance she can grasp. However, at the last moment, she relents. She is a parent herself, and as she recalls her father with thoughts of freedom and self-determination, she goes to her sons and demands that they be released into her custody for the day. Though Diana’s impending death overshadows every minute of Spencer, the film ends in bittersweet triumph, as she kidnaps her two sons for a snatched afternoon of normality.

It is with Maria that Larrain brings us to the final curtain, ending with a rhapsodic performance of Callas’s death. The subject of Maria is not hard to proces; Larrain is not an obtuse filmmaker, nor is screenwriter Steven Knight, though that does not I think preclude them from being great ones. Simply put, Larrain and Knight conceptualize Callas as a woman subjected to the coveting of all, who spends her final days in a serene fugue, weighing up her chances of ever reclaiming her talents for herself. Unlike Diana or Jackie, Maria’s access to fame was her own and not her husband’s. Callas was famous for her voice before she married and Aristotle Onassis was riding her coat more than the other way around. We also find Maria in a more emancipated state than we did Jackie or Diana, having given up singing and therefore her access to public life, she’s free to spend her days in a prison of her own memories, basking in past glories and being gnawed at by her regrets.

Maria’s voice is speaking to her. From her adolescence prostituting her voice to occupation soldiers to her adulthood singing before adoring and entitled fans, she’s lost the art of singing for herself. No truly beautiful melody was written out of joy. she says, so she wallows in sadness as if that will bring her voice back to her, leaving her loving and long suffering servants to coddle her and try thanklessly to get her to take care of herself. Her efforts to reclaim her voice are a more abstract version of the struggle towards emancipation shown in Spencer. Despite the occasional intrusion by an indelicate or resentful admirer, Callas’s struggle is largely internal, trying to rediscover a sense of purpose in singing while battling depression, addiction and her own fractured, daydreaming mind.

MARIA. Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria. Cr. Pablo Larraín/Netflix © 2024. Legendary opera singer Maria Callas performing alone on stage, flowers being flung at her feet.
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria. Cr. Pablo Larraín/Netflix © 2024.

If not as daring or startling a work as Spencer, there’s an easy experimental playfulness to Maria that comes only with maturity and fits the subject perfectly. Callas is presented as a sparkling woman well aware she’s coming apart at the seams but who is too depressed and proud to do anything about it, which permits the filmmakers some vain tongue in cheek indulgences of their own. She’s at peace with her diva image and knows it can protect her. If she pushes herself to perform the exertion will kill her, but if she keeps on the way things are going, the depression will, and she knows that whatever she decides, the people around her will enable her through it. She’s a woman who wants to go out on her own terms, but isn’t yet sure what they are going to be.

Like Jackie, Maria is also framed in terms of an interview, conducted by a journalist. But where in Jackie, this interviewer is used quite conventionally to interrogate Jackie and prompt her reflections, Maria is more playful and purposeful with the use of this character and it’s in this in particular that I think Maria defines itself as the conclusion to this cycle. Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a figment of Maria’s imagination. In her drug-induced daydreams, she imagines she is being interviewed for a documentary film about her last days*. Mandrax (the name of the tranquilizer Maria is taking) tells her he is making a film about “your last days”. Either she or he knows she will die soon, and inspired by this knowledge, she interrogates herself about her own life through this imaginary interlocutor.

Natalie Portman as Jackie, wearing a red dress.
Natalie Portman as Jackie,. Photo: courtesy Searchlight Pictures.

The conceit is as blatant a fourth-wall break as any of these films contain, with Mandrax a stand-in for the filmmaker, an opportunity for Larrain to depict himself and his own actions as a self-appointed biographer of these deceased women. And he portrays himself as a mercurial, entitled, argumentative pipsqueak haranguing a dying woman to perform for his audience. Larrain is having his cake and eating it, inviting us to understand that this character is a reflection of the pressure of legacy exerted upon these women in their lifetimes, while acknowledging that he himself is participating in that process, converting their lives into cinematic spectacle. It’s a similar form of self effacement that Martin Scorsese was practicing with his cameo at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon, almost begging his subject’s pardon for having inevitably erred somewhere in the telling of the story. He is reminding the audience that this is his version of her life story and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

It should be noted that this unofficial trilogy is a strange path for Larrain to be taking. His wheelhouse as it were is more typically defined as period dramas exploring not just privilege, as these films most certainly do, but the scars of violence left upon the Chilean people by Augusto Pinochet’s regime, explored directly in films like No, Tony Manero, Post Mortem, and El Conde and indirectly through similar stories of corruption and the insidious aftereffects of institutional violence in The Club and Neruda. These starry English-language biopics of infamous glamorous beauties are what Larrain has become best known for, but his filmmaking roots run deep into his home nation’s recent history. The biggest outlier in his catalog, belonging to neither category, is perhaps the film that bridges the gap between them the best, the mercurial erotic drama Ema. 

Set in modern day Santiago, Ema is one of only two non-period films Larrain has made (the other being The Club, which could very well have been set any time in the last forty years). Ema however is enthusiastically and unabashedly modern, it’s subject and title character (Mariana Di Girolamo) is the absolute antithesis of any of these other protagonists and yet bears some interesting parallels. She’s not cloistered, objectified or policed, she is a force of nature in her own life. Like the heroines of Spencer or Jackie she has suffered a blow that has upended her life: her son has been taken into care after he started a fire and losing him has driven a rift between her and her husband (Gael Garcia Bernal). But she resolves to do something about it. She not only wins back her ex but independently seduces both of her son’s new foster parents, single-handedly making cuckolds and adulterers of them all. Eventually revealing who she is and what she has done, she establishes a polycule built around raising her son, uniting this unconventional family around the other parents’ shared desire for her.

She has all the freedom and autonomy in the world, because of her desirability, which she wields to wrap people around her finger. She has ultimate agency throughout the narrative, due almost entirely to the fact she is at liberty to embrace and utilize her sexuality in a way that the heroines of these biopics were not. She is utterly shameless about sex, indulging in bisexual orgies with the other members of her dance troupe and bringing men and women to their knees. She also wanders around with a flamethrower setting fire to cars and lampposts, just because she can. It’s hard to imagine a more emancipated character, and yet her own motives are based upon restoring the family that the government took away from her. Ema is a steamy utopian fantasy built on the idea that a fully emancipated woman can and will move mountains. It is easy to see where Ema is everything Jackie, Diana, and Maria are not, or rather, they are the same, but she can do everything that they cannot.

Diana speaks with her friend maggie
Sally Hawkins as Maggie and Kirsten Stewart as Diana in Spencer. Image: courtesy of NEON.

By contrast, despite the fact each of these films is about a famously desired woman, the desires of the subjects themselves are confined to platonic interests. The closest relationships these women have are with their servants, who express genuine concern for their mistresses’ deteriorating mental states, and in Spencer‘s case, with her children. The closest any of these films come to providing any of their subjects with an outlet for their sexual desire is when Diana defiantly informs a spying servant that she wishes to be left alone to masturbate. Instead she cuts down the curtain and self-harms with a pair of pliers. Sex is not on the menu for any of these women, the desire they once felt for their partners’ is now a distant memory, irreconcilable with their present. They are so used to being the objects of desire, they have no frame of reference through which they can desire someone else.

It is now well know that all of these historical women’s husbands cheated on them, and it was at best an open secret at the time. In fact, Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy were rivals, Onassis married Jackie after Maria divorced him. The closest any one of these films comes to a direct acknowledgement of the link between them is when in Maria, John F. Kennedy (who is played by the same man, Caspar Phillipson, in both films) approaches Maria in the hopes of forging an alliance, and perhaps a liaison of their own, and she rebuffs him with the acknowledgement that their respective partners are off having sex with one another and she has no intention of ceding the moral high-ground she rests upon. The fourth point in this scandalous square is of course Marilyn Monroe, whose own experience of objectification and disempowerment was cataloged with significantly less taste and restraint in Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde, which dramatized Marilyn’s relationship with Kennedy (yet again played by Phillipson) as grotesquely exploitative and violent. In Maria though, Marilyn is simply to Jackie what Jackie is to Maria, a woman who made her own choices within a system designed to narrow them, battling her insecurity in her own marriage and finding a sense of pleasure, affection and status in the grasping arms of another woman’s husband. These women are hurting one another, because they have both been hurt by the same men. I wonder if Larrain and Knight ever considered dramatizing a reunion between the women, once both had lost the adulterous partners who united them. As someone interested in the ways these films are in dialogue with one another, I’d have been fascinated to see it.

Of course, this analysis is very auteur driven and there’s more to these films than that. For one, there’s the aforementioned Steven Knight who wrote two out of three of these films and so is as much the author under discussion as Larrain is. Moreover, each of these films is built around an extraordinary central performance, with Portman, Stewart and Jolie each laying claim to be “authors” of these characters, and there’s much that could be said about that for each of them. None of these women had to research how nauseating tabloid culture can be for the spirit. Stewart has always exuded an aura that suggests that in front of a camera is absolutely the last place she wants to be, and Jolie may herself one day be the subject for a biography about a famous beauty wrestling with the ghosts of her very public marriage. Penning a character of this depth is one thing; bringing them to life is another and these films’ successes—for they are all thoroughly successful—hinged on the pathos and sincerity these women brought to their parts.

For my money, Spencer is the masterpiece of the bunch, everyone’s just so on song and it contains the boldest and most electrifying sequences of the trio, but each one has a unique and distinctive mood of its own. I haven’t even mentioned the use of music in each film. Maria is soundtracked by Callas’s own recordings so of course the music there is stunning, but the scores Mica Levi and Jonny Greenwood composed for Jackie and Spencer respectively are vital to the overall effect of each film. Working with not only different composers but different cinematographers ensures each film feels inherently different to the next, and these crew members are each at the peak of their respective crafts.

For all their sterling qualities though, it is together that these films become greater than the sum of their parts. There’s no definitive version of this story, each woman’s circumstances are slightly different and it is in those differences that the greatest of their coups de cinema are found. Jackie dramatizes the immediate and lasting grief of losing a husband, Spencer the insecurity and claustrophobia of divorcing one, and Maria the pains of rediscovering one’s voice in the aftermath, but in each the rub lies in doing it all with the whole world’s eyes upon you.

Written by Hal Kitchen

A graduate of the University of Kent, Reviews Editor Hal Kitchen joined Film Obsessive as a freelance writer in May 2020 following their postgraduate studies in Film with a specialization in Gender Theory and Studies. In November 2020 Hal assumed their role as Reviews Editor. Since then, Hal has written extensively for the site, writing analytical and critical pieces on film, and has represented the site at international film festivals including The London Film Festival and Panic Fest.

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