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Amos Lassen wrote on 08/12/2010:

“Callas Forever”

A Tribute

Amos Lassen

It is 1977 in Paris and opera legend Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant) is in virtual reclusion, haunted by the ghosts of her career. Longtime friend and music promoter Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons) is in Paris to promote a punk rock band, and he call on the diva. She refuses to see him because he had set her up on a tour of Japan and Callas felt that her performances were not up to her usual. For her the tour was a disaster. Kelly does not give up easily and after some aggressive persuasion, he gets in to see her. They speak a bit and Kelly tells her that the real reason for his visit is a new project for Callas. He suggests that she appear in a series of film versions of her greatest opera roles and her voice would be dubbed from her best previous recordings. At first Callas resisted because she felt that she had nothing new to give but ultimately she consents to filming “Carmen” because it is the one role that she has never performed live on stage on stage, only in recordings. Carmen begins production, and with the help of Kelly, a longtime friend and journalist, Sarah Keller (Joan Plowright), her director and her costars, Callas is able to rediscover the excitement of artistic creation that she thought she would never have again as well as the love and adoration that millions of fans still have for her and her voice.
Ardant is wonderful playing a temperamental diva, whose entrances transform a room, who is always instantly the center of attention, who gives orders and expects to be obeyed. This is all Callas and Callas was famous in a way no other 20th century opera singer ever was. She earned and deserved her fame because her voice was called the voice of the century, and that may have been true.
Her problems with "Carmen" involve more than the dubbed soundtrack. She is concerned about how she looks. Half-persuaded she should let her fans remember her as she was and a diva has that.
The Larry Kelly played by Jeremy Irons is patient, flattering, persuasive and insidious. He seems to want to make the film not so much for himself but to collaborate with Callas on a film she should have made and never did. There is a crucial moment when he visits her apartment late at night and sees her singing along with her recordings and then crying and he realizes that anyone who sang as Callas did must always live with the pain of having lost her gift. “Callas Forever," is Franco Zeffirelli's worshipful cinematic tribute to his friend Maria Callas, is the kind of what-if movie.
The music of Puccini, which saturates the film, along with Bizet's score for "Carmen” provides the emotional tone of the film.
"Callas Forever" is compellingly acted yet it is a skimpily produced movie that looks pasted together on a limited budget. What a pity because so much of it is so good. It just could have been so much better.