Being a total philistine with zero knowledge of opera, I had no idea who Maria Callas was. All I saw was that this was considered a notable documentary plus as my wife notes it feels appropriate to watch this after we had just been to see the Phantom of the Opera here in Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately while this film does convince you that Callas is undoubtedly a legendary singer, it is a terrible documentary as the director Tom Volf is a clearly a devoted fan who absolutely refuses to show her in any kind of a bad light.

As alluded by its title, there is no narrator in this documentary. The story of Maria Callas’ life is recounted by the woman herself in the form of various interviews she gave as well as the letters she wrote. The letters are read by another opera singer Joyce DiDonato who remarkably sounds quite similar to Maria herself. She recounts how she was born in New York and is therefore fully American even though everyone thinks she is European, how she was pushed hard by her mother to become a singer and her gratefulness to her teacher Elvira de Hidalgo. She also talks about her incredible success and tries to defend herself from accusations that she is a difficult to work with diva. Yet she is strangely silent on the details of her marriage to Giovanni Meneghini, saying only that her success went to his head. On the other hand, she is more than happy to talk about her relationship with Aristotle Onassis. It is clear that she considered him the love of her life and dearly wished to marry him though he did not.

Letting a famous figure speak of her life in her own words seems like it should be workable and for a while it does when Callas speaks of her childhood and upbringing. It feels real when she talks about her resentment against her mother and argues about how no child should be deprived of a childhood as she was. But it soon becomes obvious that the film absolutely refuses to say anything bad at all about her. It’s one thing when she defends herself against diva accusations by saying that she was no worse than any other opera singer, but it gets positively damning when the film is completely silent on how she met her husband and why she married him. She is happy to talk about Onassis but again this is all her side of the story and it gets uncomfortable that we never hear anything from his perspective or that of his other lovers or his own children. A great example of the selective bias at work is when she works on the film Medea and talks about how she would like to do more cinema work. Yet she never did because Medea was a failure but you wouldn’t know that from watching this documentary.

This film is tiresome in other ways as well. The footage of Callas’ actual performances are of course fantastic and very welcome. The scenes of her being interviewed on television are okay. But a large proportion of the included footage is of her being feted by adoring crowds. Whether it’s her soaking in applause after a show, being photographed on the red carpet or most commonly alighting from a plane as she arrives in whichever city she is due to perform in, the camera delights in playing up her glamor and how she is universally loved. Showing modern audiences the extent of her importance as a cultural phenomenon is of course important, but the film uses this kind of footage so often that it becomes tiresome. Is this really the best use of the film’s time when it leaves out so many important details of her life such as the near-sightedness that apparently meant she could hardly see the audience while onstage or how her weight changes affected her voice or her relationships and rivalries with other singers.

There’s no doubt that Maria Callas is a remarkable public figure and any effort to remind modern audiences of her life is laudable. Unfortunately this film serves only as an entry point and by being content in being only a celebrity puff-piece from the perspective of an adoring fan, it is terrible at being a documentary. It is so one-sided and effusive in its praise for Callas that it’s hard to recommend this documentary to anyone. Finding out more information about her from other sources is a much better bet.