Archive for the ‘Pablo Larrain’ Category

Maria

Director: Pablo Larrain

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancisco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Biligner, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino, Caspar Phillipson

Running Time: 2 hours and 4 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Chilean director Pablo Larrain completes his beautiful trilogy of powerful and iconic woman with his latest film Maria starring Oscar winner Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted) as Greek Opera diva Maria Callas all set in the last week of her gorgeous and tragic life in Paris in 1977. His first two films Jackie and Spencer were brilliant and earned both Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart Oscar nominations for their turn as Jacqueline Kennedy and Diana Spencer respectively.

Angelina Jolie is extraordinary as Maria offering crisp pronunciation of all of screenwriter Steven Knight’s best lines as the fickle and eccentric Maria Callas.

In a series of televised interviews with the eccentric Mandrax played by Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog) as he dutifully follows Maria around Paris, she looks back in her glamourous career and her famous love affair with Greek shipping Tycoon Aristotle Onassis played by Turkish actor Haluk Biligner.

At the centre of Larrain’s film Maria is the diva’s relationship with her two dutiful servants, the Italian butler Ferruccio wonderfully played by Pierfrancisco Favino (Rush, The Traitor) and Bruna played by Alba Rohrwacher (My Brilliant Friend, The Lost Daughter). Ferruccio is adoring of Maria Callas but disapproves of her nonchalance regarding her ever failing health.

As Steven Knight’s script weaves a fascinating if slightly confusing tale about Maria Callas’s splendid life including her superb performances at some of the worlds best Opera Houses including La Scala and The Metropolitan he deftly links Larrain’s film Jackie to Maria with the reappearance of JFK played by Danish actor Caspar Phillipson who also appeared as Jackie’s husband. The link is clear and historical. After the assassination of JFK, Jacqui Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis after he broke off his affair with Maria Callas.

It is a travesty that Angelina Jolie did not get a 2025 Oscar nomination for her role as Maria Callas. She really was superb, at once elegant and tragic, maintaining her dignity and defiance in the face of impending death.

Pablo Larrain’s film Maria is beautiful but flawed in places, although there are lots of lavish historical references to the Diva’s glamourous life in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I found parts of the film slightly repetitive although the film is saved by alluring cinematography by Ed Lachman who has been Oscar nominated.

Maria is mainly for Opera fans and this film version is a fitting bookend to Larrain’s complete fascination with these iconic women, a sumptuous end to a fascinating trilogy. Maybe he will do a film about Marilyn Monroe since she is referenced in this film when she sang Happy Birthday Mr President to JFK. Larrain clearly loves iconic moment.

Like the opera diva herself, the city of Paris in 1977 is the other character, haunting and sparking in the soft hues of autumn. The French capital is a perfect back drop for a film about the fading life of a legendary Opera star as she flounders amidst her sumptuous apartment amongst beautiful clothes, sparkling jewels and illicit drugs.

Pablo Larrain’s Maria gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10, a beautiful film which could have been stylistically improved, saved by astonishing performances by Angelina Jolie and Pierfrancisco Favino.

Jackie

Director: Pablo Larrain

Cast: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Richard E. Grant, John Hurt, John Carroll Lynch, Caspar Phillipson, Beth Grant, Max Casella

Producer Darren Aronofsky and Chilean director Pablo Larrain bring an exquisite and heart wrenching portrait of Jackie Kennedy just moments after her husband President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas on the 22nd November 1963 in Jackie.

Oscar winner Natalie Portman (Black Swan) is sublime as Jackie and considering that she is in virtually every frame of the film, shot in mostly extreme close up, Portman delivers a poignant portrait of Jackie as she is suddenly stripped of her position as first lady while also dealing with suddenly becoming a young widow to two small children, John and Caroline Kennedy.

Simultaneously, Larrain explores the mythical concepts of History, Identity and Beauty as Jackie has to boldly deal with the aftermath of an assassination and the claustrophobia of grief intertwined with state politics and diplomacy.

Jackie has to decide what type of funeral she would like for John F. Kennedy and amidst the security concerns following her husband’s dramatic assassination, she opts for a full length funeral parade, which symbolically become the most watched event on American Television in the early 1960’s.

Screenwriter Noah Oppenheimer’s seductive script pulls viewers into the traumatic world of Jackie Kennedy, deconstructing the myth of a debutante stripped of her power, yet ironically her glamour and poise managed to embed itself in the American psyche for decades after her role as the First Lady of the United States.

Jackie is a stunning, visually dazzling historical portrait of a very specific moment in American history, the aftermath of one of the most pivotal assassinations, which irreparably changed the course of American politics and society redefining the 1960’s as a tumultuous decade. Cleverly what the film does not do is delve into any conspiracy theories surrounding the infamous assassination, but exclusively focuses on how Jackie deals with the funeral and subsequent interviews afterwards.

Audiences should look out for strong supporting roles by Peter Sarsgaard (Blue Jasmine) as Bobbie Kennedy, Greta Gerwig as loyal assistant Nancy Tuckerman and John Hurt as unnamed priest who Jackie confides in. Incidentally Jackie was one of Hurt’s last films before he died in 2017.

The costumes by Madeline Fontaine, which she won a 2017 BAFTA Award for, are gorgeous clearly recreating the iconic style of Jackie Kennedy and the production design by Jean Rabasse (The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen) is equally fitting.

What makes Jackie so inspiring is the unconventional approach of Larrain’s direction as he inter cuts scenes of the massive funeral march in Washington DC with the graphic violence of the actual assassination in the backseat of a convertible sedan speeding along a Dallas highway, blood stains on Jackie’s pink Chanel suit.

Like director Barry Jenkins’s Oscar winning film Moonlight, Jackie intensely captures the audience’s attention and never let’s go, anchored by a brilliant performance by Natalie Portman who in my opinion should have won the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 2017 Oscars, although perhaps the odds were stacked in favour of Emma Stone winning for La La Land.

Gorgeous, riveting and emotionally draining, Jackie is a vivid and intricate tour de force of an iconic figure who used her widowhood to become more famous, made all the more touching by the scenes with her two very young children.

My film rating for Jackie is 9.5 out of 10. Having directed an exceptionally vivid film, director Pablo Larrain is a talent to watch out for.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy