Jolie has become cinema's most risk-averse star - she needs Kidman's courage

Staid biopic 'Maria' and erotic thriller 'Babygirl' expose how far the two women's careers have diverged, says Xan Brooks

- Xan Brooks

The film year opens with a jostle of egos, a rustle of couture and the sight of two old acquaintances vying for Oscar glory, metaphorically throwing bricks at each other across the garden wall. On one side we have Angelina Jolie acting as the diva in Maria, Pablo Larrain’s elegiac account of the last days of opera singer Callas. On the other, there’s Nicole Kidman as the eponymous Babygirl, a high-flying executive who’s brought down to earth with a bang. Both films are stylish, confident and generally satisfying affairs. Both, though, are predominantly support systems; and showcases. They exist to provide a stage or springboard for their respective headline acts.

Maria is the more lavish and stately production. The final part of Larrain’s loose trilogy of tales about wealthy, wounded women – following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer – picks its way through an autumnal 1970s Paris, from the apartment to the bistro to the Jardins du Luxembourg. It has a liveried butler in close attendance and trails an air of melancholia that’s as thick as posh cologne.

Officially, 49-year-old Jolie is playing 53-year-old Callas, the Greek-born soprano, four years retired and contemplating a comeback. But she is also implicitly referencing herself: one legend nodding to another to the point where the actor and her character become almost indivisible. Larrain is a dynamic and distinctive filmmaker, but here he doesn’t so much direct Jolie as administer to her needs. He handles his star as though she’s a porcelain swan, lightly steering her from one set-piece to the next as Callas pops her heart pills and browbeats her servants. “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am,” she demands. “I am in the mood for adulation.” Larrain, for his part, is all too happy to oblige.

Where Maria goes about its duties like a doting butler,