Angelina Jolie: “We women should help each other, encourage each other to persevere in gentleness”

For a brief moment, we thought we were starting a conversation with an artificial intelligence. Not that Angelina Jolie responds mechanically, on the contrary she displays treasures of kindness and attention, precise, polite, she hesitates, doubts a lot, smiles with quiet sweetness. But there is this je ne sais quoi of the unreal and the fantasized about her which increases when she appears by Zoom on the computer. A digital creature side that seems to have stuck to his skin forever. The Lara Croft effect? The lot of all the stars of the big screen? Or something more mysterious? Chilean director Pablo Larraín takes full advantage of this aura in “Maria,” an elegant biopic that makes Angelina Jolie a Maria Callas more iconic than ever. Unless it’s the other way around. “I didn’t know her any more than most people,” says the actress. For me, he was a somewhat distant figure, because he was immense. It wasn’t until I delved into her life that I realized how much work, technique, control and power it took to get to this point, and most importantly how vulnerable she was. »

Vulnerable, but sovereign, this is how Maria Callas/Angelina Jolie navigates the film. As it crosses bourgeois Paris in the 1970s, between the Tuileries and the Palais-Royal. Or his twilight apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel. Majestic hangings, a grand piano and haute couture dressing room, everything is there. Until the XXL pharmacy. It is that in this month of September 1977, a few days after her death, at the age of 53, two years after the disappearance of Onassis and more than four years after her last performance on stage, the diva lived in crazy solitude, heart, liver and voice exhausted, high on steroids, stimulants and sleeping pills.

Wolf Mother

After Jackie Kennedy in 2016 (“Jackie”) and Diana in 2021 (“Spencer”), this is the third broken icon that Larraín has filmed. In reality, it is also Angie that he documents, with close-ups of a face hallucinating in symmetry, of these immense lips, this silhouette so light, this bearing of a melancholic queen. The film is from