CALLAS FOREVER is a beautifully written, tenderly directed and acted tribute to the immortal Maria Callas by a man who knew her as well as anyone - Franco Zeffirelli. The fantasy of placing Callas on film for posterity in the last year of her life, the year she died of heart failure, when her voice was gone but her artistry remained is the means by which Zeffirelli memorializes the Diva and in every way he succeeds.

The year is 1977 and Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant) is in seclusion in her Paris apartment, grieving over 1) her beloved Aristotle Onassis who left her for Jacqueline Kennedy and then died and 2) her disastrous farewell concert in Japan which ended her magnificent career with a flop. No longer able to sing she lives in the past, listing to her old recordings and taking pills. Only her constant maid Bruna (Anna Lelio) is allowed to comfort her with occasional visits from her warm-hearted publicist Sarah Keller (Joan Plowright).

In Paris for the promotion of a punk group Bad Dreams is Larry Kelley (Jeremy Irons) who has just met and bedded a young artist Michael (Jay Rodan): Kelley had been Callas' agent in her heyday and Michael has been creating paintings inspired by her recordings. Seeing Michael's obsession over Callas whom he has never seen perform forces Kelley to visit Callas, their devotion to each other is 'rekindled' and Kelley proposes a film version of Callas not only to bring her out of her depression but to capitalize on the fact that present and future generations should have a filmed account of the penultimate opera singer of the 20th century.

Callas is recalcitrant at first, not wanting to produce a fraudulent film made using her old recordings dubbed onto the sound track of a current staging, but she finally resolves her hesitancy by granting the filming of 'Carmen', a role she recorded but never played on the stage. Thus the project is launched and Callas is revitalized and happy again, being satisfied with the miracle of technology that allows her to invest her energies in the acting of Carmen while consenting to lip-synch to her old recordings. She even has a say in the casting of the other roles, especially Don Jose - Marco (a very hunky Gabriel Garko, a former model and Mr. Italy!). She retains her temper tantrums and demands for perfection that hallmarked her real career, doing her own dancing, having a say about costumes, etc.

The film is eventually finished and the result is magnificent. There is even some intrigue when Marco shows more than a little interest in her (a hint of the Strauss Marshallin/Octavian encounter). But alas at the end of the film Callas is forced to admit that her youth cannot be regained and decides the film is a 'fraudulent work' is not compatible with her life's devotion to truth in music. She asks Kelley to destroy it. How these two come to grips with their individual lives (Kelley's Michael has left him and he is once again as alone as Callas) is finessed by one of the most tender endings on film.

Fanny Ardant is a miracle as Callas: she inhabits her physically, understands Callas' facial features as she lip-synchs her operas, and seems to be a reincarnation of the Diva. Jeremy Irons gives one of the finest performances of his rich career as the aging gay agent and Joan Plowright adds just the right amount of lightness and grace as Sarah Keller - wise, acerbic, yet supportive of both Callas and Kelley. The scenes of Paris are correctly nostalgic: the sets for 'Carmen' by Carlo Centolavigna create a gold standard for all future true productions of 'Carmen'. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent.

Zeffirelli has succeeded in giving us a memorial to Maria Callas and for that the opera world will be forever grateful. The passages of the many arias used in this film are among the finest versions Callas recorded. Everything about this work is brilliant and it deserves the widest audience possible. Grady Harp

Gallic actress Fanny Ardant is an inspired choice to play Maria Callas, and with her uncanny physical and likely temperamental resemblance, she plays the legendary soprano with real brio and scenery-chewing style. I would not have expected anything less in such a fanciful telling of a what-if scenario that sprouted out of director Franco Zeffirelli's fertile imagination. Zeffirelli is no stranger to the extravagant and visually resplendent as he helmed the Burtons-at-play 1967 "The Taming of the Shrew" and the much-beloved, age-appropriate 1968 version of "Romeo and Juliet". His long-time professional relationship with Callas provides the basis for this fantasy where in 1977, she is drawn out of self-imposed exile and into the limelight one last time by a fictitious concert promoter, Larry Kelly, who had long ago decided to forego opera for the more lucrative world of punk rock. Sporting a silly ponytail, Jeremy Irons portrays Kelly as a predictably irascible character who mercurially worships and degrades her as the circumstance dictates, a variation on the character he would play in "Being Julia". This time, his character is gay, of course, probably to avoid any element of romance that would detract from Callas' obsession with preserving her legacy.

Kelly's idea is to film her while acting out famous operatic roles on a sound stage and lip-synching the words, whereupon sound engineers would graft her recordings of some 22 years earlier onto the sound track. The series is to be called "Callas Forever" and starts with Bizet's "Carmen". After a rapid series of contrived scenes that resuscitate Callas from her Paris apartment seclusion back to international press attention, the film finally catches fire with the scenes that create the opera production itself. This is where Zeffirelli really shines as he makes Ardant look and act strikingly like Callas at her most passionate and charismatic. She is, of course, adored by her colleagues (in particular, an admiring young tenor playing Don Jose, as embodied by Gabriel Garko) and seems on the brink of a renaissance. Alas, it is the completion of this production that inspires Zeffirelli, along with co-writer Martin Sherman, to take the plot to the height of soap opera banality. Basking in her newly reborn confidence, Callas wants to take on Puccini's "Tosca" with her real voice, an idea supported blindly by Kelly but rejected by her backers. Instead of being crushed, she seems resigned to her legacy and insists that her "Carmen" be destroyed as she deems it a fraud.

That she comes to this realization after the fact is one of the central conceits of the film since it implies she has been cavalier about the efforts around her who did believe in her, but I suppose that is what diva behavior is all about. After all, at the beginning, Callas is portrayed as a pill-popper who feels sorry for herself as a has-been, her voice shot during an infamous tour in Japan, and as the rejected paramour of Aristotle Onassis, who cast her aside to marry Jackie Kennedy. Throughout the movie, she is haunted by her former voice with ghostly visions of her stage triumphs. These kinds of excesses seem appropriate to this kind of tribute film, but it all feels so predictably over-the-top. Sadly, Joan Plowright stereotypically plays a music journalist as a wisecracking, truth-bearing confidante that Thelma Ritter would have played with greater aplomb in the fifties. There is a persistent clunkiness to Zeffirelli and Sherman's screenplay and an overall lack of subtlety that can only be blamed on Zeffirelli's heavily ornate, Baroque film-making style. The DVD is short on extras as there is no audio commentary track, but it does include a brief making-of featurette, additional interview excerpts with Zeffirelli and the principal players and several trailers including the one for the movie.

This movie is very beautiful. It's plot is essentially a fantasy by Zeffirelli, revolving around the idea of Callas starring in a film production of Bizet's Carmen, at a time when her life was drawing to it's close and her magnificent voice had been reduced to a painful echo of it's former glory. This setup is completely imaginary - Zeffirelli, of course, being intimate with Callas, having worked with her on a number of productions - and although Callas is at the focal point of the story, one can safely assume that this movie is as much about Zeffirelli himself as it is about the great diva.

The film's main characters - the aging artist, the agent, the film critic - are mainly used to explore themes familiar to those living the life of artistic creation; the fading of creative powers, the meaning of integrity in art, the influence of money and publicity, love and the beauty of youth. This is Zeffireli speaking here, making use of one of the most expressive voices ever heard, to express feelings of his own.

It is is better not to approach this movie guided by expectations of absorbing revealing biographical elements. Though Ardant convincingly depicts the arrogance and overbearing personality which were often present in Callas' behaviour - with a few very convincing tantrums thrown in - there is a sentimentality projected that is more of a wishful thinking than factual characterization; one can hardly imagine Callas enjoying herself in an impromptu picnic in a park, surrounding herself with nothing but carefree informality. But the movie is very strong on most aspects; the directing is fabulous, both in it's pace and in it's settings, and the acting - Jeremy Irons in particular - is truly exceptional. And then it's the music - wonderful singing from Callas' voice, coupled with scenes from a very spirited production of Carmen where Ardant gives a convincing performance in a very demanding part.

For some people the movie will prove somewhat unsatisfying, the more so if one focuses exclusively on Callas at the cost of ignoring other nuances and ideas, and the sheer pleasure of listening to the music and singing. But it is definitely recommended to watch, and for opera lovers it is a must see.