Review by Billy Newbery
Maria, the third film in Pablo Larrain’s trilogy on powerful and influential women is once again a visually stunning marvel that is often utterly breathtaking, whose structure and style is something to behold, following down the same highly formal path as Jackie and Spencer.
Maria focuses on our titular character’s last days, as she reflects back on her life, constantly hallucinating about moments from her past. This is presented to us through a series of scenes in which the audience is constantly told how Maria feels about the most defining moments of her entire life such as; opera performances, childhood traumas and romances. Getting this dictation of events and feelings often prevents any real emotional understanding or empathy for Maria to be built. Rather, the film stays mostly in one emotional place no matter what we see, the claustrophobic lows of Maria’s depression, which is a powerful feeling. While this works for some scenes, the lack of variation or any real highs ends up affecting us like real depression does by making us feel distant and cold to what is happening. Disconnected from the film and more importantly Maria herself.
Oddly enough the moment of greatest connection comes once the credits roll and we see the archival footage of the real Maria. This technique is nothing new, but in the context of this film it’s the only time you get to see Maria happy for once. You get to see a person you can relate to, someone you understand and can care about. You get to actually see her complicated personality, her wanting for love shown in every aspect of her being. These brief clips bring more pathos than we get throughout the whole film in which Maria is nothing more than a woman in pain whose statements and superficial actions are meant to stand in for her personality.
Even with the brilliant style, the well-crafted performance and flashy formal elements, the lack of warmth towards the character turns the film into borderline misery porn. Showing suffering for the sake of suffering, pathos for Maria is what we desperately needed and it’s what we got in the other two films of this trilogy. With it this film could have been something brilliant, if you can look past it you may find Maria to still be a wonderful film but without that empathy and warmth it becomes a beautiful piece of work with a near hollow inside.