Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

jwills-5 Zeffirelli, director of many great operas and personal friend of Callas, develops in an artistic and sensitive way the last months of her life when she suffers from her temperament, from the abandonment and subsequent marriage of Onassis, from her loss of voice and from her addiction to tranquilizers. Larry (Jeremy Irons) manages to convince her to film Bizet's opera, which never represented on stage, taking advantage of technological advances that combine her performance at age 53 with the audio recordings in their moments of glory at age 30. A great operatic performance with high quality, wonderful music and excellent acting of all participants. Fanny Ardant (Maria Callas), manages to represent the tough but sensible character of the great diva of the twentieth century. Worth watching and enjoy.

chaos-rampant I don't think they got this right, and it's a bizarre project to boot. It's a highly fictionalized tale of the great opera singer in her waning days, in which she attempts to revive her image by agreeing to star in a film production of Carmen. What was the point?It seems this: on one hand a portrait of the passionate, hysteric woman, Fanny Ardent is truly spot on as the tempestuous Callas. More deeply, Zeffirelli who had known and worked with her on the stage, structures his film around the public image of the late Callas—the Parisian recluse lost in herself and past glories—to give us a sort of introspective insight of a damaged soul.So a kind of Sunset Blvd.It all fits together in a way. Callas' voice in the film is her own, and when all is said and done, that voice was what made Callas who she was, the only thing that was uniquely hers. And yet, the obsessive woman bent everything to match the image she thought she had to be on that stage, which may have contributed to her singing decline.So in the film, we have Callas' marvellous voice, a faithful image of her in Ardent as Callas past her prime making a film to revive a past image she had created, which she eventually rejects as false. And the film is based one can presume, on liberally fabricated memories of an associate.Everything else in the film reflects that business with the creation of illusion—the Japanese failure, her visitation by personal ghosts and passionate lip-synching to old records, the fictionalized Carmen film where she must dub herself using old recordings, an effort she insists is fake, an illusion.It's a heady film, but it doesn't work. You could make a great film on the subject, in fact it is what Mulholland Dr. is all about. But not about Callas, who was a sincerely melodramatic being, which means showing her as she was, you get a histrionic character like the ones she played. And apparently, not by Zeffirelli's hands.This fits together as an operatic artifact of fabricated memories, but at the expense of the more subtle introspective capacity of cinema.

bandw This story fictionalizes what *could* have happened in the last year of the life of the great soprano Maria Callas. By 1977, the time of this movie, Callas' voice had realized its best days and she is seen sitting around listening to some of her early recordings and pining over her lost glory. Her former manager and friend, Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons) is concerned about Maria and wants to bring her out of hiding by having her lip-sync a performance of "Carmen" to a recording she had made, but never performed. In fact, one of the few facts in this film as far as I can tell, Callas did record a complete "Carmen" but never performed it. At first Callas demurs, but then takes a fancy to Kelly's idea.The highlights of "Callas Forever" are the enactments of scenes from "Carmen" with Fanny Ardant lip-syncing to Callas' recording. These are lavishly done and, rather than make this movie, I wish that director Zeffirelli had done a complete "Carmen" in the style of the enactments. I think that would have been a lasting tribute to Callas and provided us with what a Callas performance might have been like. It was hard for me to understand the fictional Callas' final abandonment of the project, after it had been completed, on the basis that it would have been dishonest. Some famous operas with top-notch performers, like the 1975 film production of "The Marriage of Figaro," (with Kiri Te Kanawa no less) had performers lip-syncing (often poorly so) to a recording they had made. Maybe the idea was that Callas would think it a fraud to perform to a recording she had made over a decade earlier? Or was she afraid she might be too old to play the part at the age of 53? They can do great things with makeup, yes?. But then I am speculating on a speculation.The story never gelled for me. The side story that has Larry involved in a gay relationship with a young man seemed like just a diversion. Or was it inserted to indicate that Larry had no romantic interest in Callas? I think that loosely basing a fictionalized story on a real person is a bit dangerous. We are left with not knowing quite what is real and what is fantasy. What are we going to have next, a computerized Marlon Brando losing 200 pounds to come back in his latter years to play "King Lear?"Anyway, on the positive side there is an ample sampling of Callas' recordings for us to appreciate why she is considered one of the best sopranos of the twentieth century.

canscene Three copies of Callas Forever turned up recently at Toronto's Queen Viceo and as a long time opera buff, I rented a copy as soon as I spotted it on the shelvesHorrified to learn of it shaving been almost totally ignored, I found this film a joy, with splendid performances by Ardant and Irons and asked myself why. . The universal theme of learning to accept ageing with grace far transcends the background-- just in case you loathe opera -- and the principals, who take up the majority of screen time, express two sides of the same coin with great performances.Franci Zeffirelli's loving direction of Callas Forever matches his imaginative concept and while we know that the incidents in the film never really took place the fact that they unfold so convincingly enable the director and his cast to drive home the theme of this fine film with such graceful impact. The final scene between Ardant and Irons is masterful and all the more moving because of its restraintLack of exposure certainly wasn't due to the fact that Iron s' portrayal of a gay impresario might have been considered inappropriate -- not in 2002!The obtuse Philistines responsible for booking and distributing films are once again at fault for debasing public taste. I wonder how may young and middle-aged people who will eventually see the film will turn to Maria Callas' recordings which fortunately are still available The rendition of Puccini's Vissi d'arte from Tosca mimed by Ardant to Callas' voice said everything about her character:" I lived for my art --- I lived for love"For my part, I've been able to locate Pasolinik's Medea, in which Callas makes her one and only appearance as an actress.As I write, I recall another fine film about opera: Istvan Szabo's Meeting Venus which I must see again as indeed I will return to Callas Forever.