Callas Forever

So, Franco Zeffirelli's Callas Forever. (If you haven't seen it, there's a synopsis at the official website.)

I marched off to the cinema cocksure that I would hate the film, and much to my surprise I did not. Don't get me wrong: it's a nice little movie but no masterpiece, and it has some dreadful elements (the Larry-Michael plot, for example). Some folks were offended by the inevitable gay-knight-in-shining-armor thing (only we truly loved her! waah!), but by now I'm largely inured to all that. Maybe my generally positive reaction was just a happy upshot of low expectations.

Or maybe not. First of all, Fanny Ardant and Joan Plowright: who does not adore them does not deserve to live. I loved Ardant in the "Un bel dì" sequence. Yes, it's obvious: Butterfly clings to the deluded hope that Pinkerton will return; the Callas character nourishes similar hopes for her voice and career, perhaps also thinks of her dead and faithless lover Onassis. It's very movingly played, and for most of the scene, Ardant draws on just the kind of contained, essential gestures that Callas likely would have used. (Many people think of Callas, incorrectly, as a scenery-chewer.) Ardant's work is all the more impressive given the mere wisps of documentation we have of Callas as Butterfly: a few stills from her only stage performances (in Chicago, fifty years ago) and a "Chelsea at Eight" telecast of "Un bel dì" that I've not yet seen. (If anyone out there has seen the telecast, I would be grateful to know to what extent Ardant's gestures approximate those of Callas.)

Also interesting is the weird layering of people and events in Callas Forever. Take Jeremy Irons as Larry Kelly. Irons strongly resembles Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed Callas in Medea, her only film, and remained close to her until his ghastly murder. (I see something of Visconti in Irons' brow, too.) Lawrence Kelly, a founder of the Chicago and Dallas opera companies, was a lifelong friend to Callas; and Zeffirelli himself tried to convince Callas to make at least one lip-synched opera film (of Tosca). It's like watching a photographic gel ooze and melt, or becoming wise to the tricks that memory can play while being helpless to stop them. (Unless I'm mistaken, the person made up as Onassis in the framed photo that the Callas character handles several times is Zeffirelli himself. What that might suggest… um, let's not go there.)

The confusion between the roles we play and who we "really" are (quaint notion, that) is a mainstay of Callas lore: the woman "Maria" versus the diva "la Callas," etc. Callas Forever is hard to read in this respect, and rightfully so. The Callas character insists that "honesty" was the core of her work; her interlocutor sensibly counters that her doings on stage were make-believe. Echoes of Nino Rota noodle their way through Alessio Vlad's score, and the director of the would-be Carmen film is a Fellini look-alike. Who more obsessively than Fellini explored the slippery boundaries between fact and fantasy, life and art? What exactly is happening when we watch the film Callas Forever, in which a fictional Callas watches a fictional film of a fictional Callas lip-synching to the recorded voice of the "real" Callas, enacting a performance that the "real" Callas never gave?

The time cues in the movie are pointedly indeterminate, contributing to its dreamlike quality. The Clash and the pissing punks of "Bad Dreams" situate us in 1977, but many characters appear in turn-of-the-millennium dress, and Ardant's Dior couture hearkens back to the 1950s and 1960s. Incidentally, there was an uproariously disingenuous quote on this topic from Karl Lagerfeld in the New York Times: "I was very careful not to copy anything that Callas actually wore." Cher Monsieur, pray tell what you're smoking, because I could do with a long, strange trip about now. The wide-brimmed white hat and matching ensemble are echt New Look, and there is a famous photograph of Callas in nearly identical garb alongside Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; the turban-and-suit combo comes from the days of the Onassis-Vergottis trial. (Désolée, Karl, but you can't fool an old fashion whore and vedova callasiana.)

In the end, what won me over is that for all its shortcomings and clichés, Callas Forever does seem to be coming from a place of love—in stark contrast to, say, the derisive and viciously misogynistic Master Class. As the story draws to a close, the Callas character asks Larry not to release the Carmen film. Has she chosen imprisonment in the past, in the glory days of a career that can never return? Or has she refused the living death of miming to the voice of yore in favor of a more vital impermanence? 2,500 years ago, Callas's countryman Heraclitus taught that the essence of life is change: "Everything flows, nothing stands still." Perhaps in choosing evanescence, the Callas character paradoxically gains life. When last we see her face in the film, she is smiling.

Comments

[julianne]

Oooh! What a lovely review. Here's to "vital impermanence" -

*lifts glass*