Callas Forever is a fictional account of what might have been the last days of the life of Maria Callas, who died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of fifty-three. When the film begins, Larry Kelly (played by Jeremy Irons), an entirely fictional concert promoter with a pony tail and a desire for a certain attractive man who was on the same flight, has arrived in Paris. Although he has arrived to produce a rock concert, he is also carrying an extraordinary idea--that Maria Callas, who recently lost her operatic voice while on tour in Japan and has become a recluse in her apartment, may yet achieve operatic immortality. His idea is to videotape her while acting famous operatic roles on a sound stage and lipsyncing the words, whereupon sound engineers will graft her recordings of some twenty-two years earlier onto the sound track. The videotape series is to be called "Callas Forever." Kelly, who has never before invested in any of his former Callas productions, plans to bankroll half of the project and to secure investors for the other half. First, however, Kelly must present the proposal to Callas (played by Fanny Ardani). At first, she refuses to see him. She is taking pills of some sort, feels sorry for herself as a has-been as well as a reject of Aristotle Onassis, who cast her aside to marry Jackie Kennedy, and she cannot sleep at night because she is haunted by her former voice, which she lipsyncs while playing her classic longplaying records (LPs). One day, Kelly barges into her apartment to beg her to embark on the project, and she eventually agrees when Kelly proposes that in the first opera of the series she will play the role of Carmen, an opera that she never performed on the stage yet recorded for an LP. A magnificent production then unfolds, in which Callas regains her vitality, is reborn as an opera star, is adored by her coworkers, and is even loved platonically by Marco, the young leading tenor who sings the part of Don Jose (played by Gabriel Garco). Kelly's next scheduled project is a taping of La Traviata, but Callas instead prefers Tosca. However, one day she rethinks the entire concept, characterizes what she is doing as fraudulent, and she demands that the Carmen in which so many invested so much must be destroyed. Kelly, whose obsessive pursuit of the project has even cost him a lover, a handsome and talented painter named Michael (played by Jay Rodan), then sobs as Callas walks away. He has been unable to reward posterity with a glimpse of the greatest soprano of all time. Thus, Callas Forever fits into the genre of Sunset Boulevard (1950). The real Maria Callas, meanwhile, remains somewhat of a mystery despite twenty-nine books written about her. For the film's director Franco Zeffirelli, who collaborated with Callas in their 1957 La Traviata stage production, the film doubtless serves as a eulogy to his most memorable star. MH
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