It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.
Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”
The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)
“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”
Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”
At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.
Elisabeth Vincentelli
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