The life story of Maria Callas, the most celebrated and adored opera singer of modern times, has been told countless times. Not only is she the subject of numerous biographies, but her life has inspired novels (most recently Daisy Goodwin’s Diva), a Broadway play (Terrence McNally’s Master Class), a piece of performance art (Marina Abramović’s 7 Deaths of Maria Callas), and even a ‘psychobiography’ (Paul Wink’s Prima Donna), which attempted to analyse her from beyond the grave. Each of these focuses on a particular aspect of the Callas legend, whether it be her love life, her musings on her art, or her alleged narcissism.

Pablo Larraín’s new biopic of the singer tells a story of physical, psychological and vocal decline, which flicks between Callas’ final sad, self-sabotaging weeks in Paris in 1977 and flashbacks to her earlier life. Though the abrupt disjunctions between scenes may confuse viewers unfamiliar with the subject, they are surely a deliberate ploy: to represent the incoherence of memory, particularly when one is not in one’s right mind. The sedative Mandrax, frantically guzzled or surreptitiously stuffed into coat and dress pockets, looms large, and passers-by transform spontaneously into opera choruses in surreal, kitsch hallucinations.

Larraín’s particular angle is to meditate on questions of self-representation: how Callas sought to guide her own mythmaking. The ailing singer, still dictating to those around her whether they may call her Maria or ‘La Callas’ on any given day, constantly attempts to piece together fragments of her own biography, though she has no intention of committing it to paper. (Her sister, by contrast, urges her to ‘close the door’ on disturbing memories from their childhood of being coerced by their mother to ‘entertain’ Nazi officers in German-occupied Greece.) Callas is accompanied on walks by an imaginary documentary maker, also playfully named Mandrax, with whom she spars wittily and forges a trusting relationship, to the point where he confesses he has fallen in love with her.

This is a narrative that Callas believes herself able to control, but of course there is another over which she has no influence. This is epitomised by an encounter with a grubby hack who infiltrates a private recording session intended to boost her flagging confidence, makes a bootleg recording, and informs her of his intention to tell the world she can no longer sing. Elsewhere, Callas, the arch manipulator, seeks deliberately to ‘display’ herself, sitting at pavement cafés with the objective of courting adoration. This ploy, too, goes badly wrong when a passer-by confronts her, telling her that she broke his heart in New York, not with the beauty of her performance, but by failing to show up.

Larraín has a sharp-eyed gift for capturing the loneliness of the very rich and famous. Let down by family and lovers, and apparently lacking friends of any description, Callas finds solace, of a sort, only with people she pays. Her butler and housekeeper, played with exceptional tenderness by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, are humble people who are often on the receiving end of Callas’s caprices. She is not above behaving spitefully in response to their quiet gestures of concern – demands for the pointless repositioning of her grand piano become a leitmotiv throughout the film – and yet we feel that their indulgence of her actually verges on love. They tell her her singing is magnificent when patently it is not, they collect her after embarrassing scenes in cafés, and, in a rare, moving scene where the singer seems genuinely happy, play cards together late into the night.

Jolie does not attempt an impersonation as such, but adopts a haughtiness, destabilised by vulnerability, which creates a believable character, and she does a good job of capturing the inflections of Callas’s spoken accent, mid-way between American and English RP. Her miming, in flashbacks where we hear Callas’s voice but see Jolie acting on stage, is pretty much flawless: a rare achievement in a film about classical music. And though many were sceptical, she has been trained to produce a very decent sound when singing herself, albeit with an element of synthesization.

Unsurprisingly, the film is filled with operatic music, either sung or in non-diegetic instrumental arrangement. Desdemona’s sorrowful prayer from Verdi’s Otello is a particularly persistent presence, and it is fitting that excerpts from Puccini’s Tosca – such a triumphant signature work for the singer – should fill our heroine’s mind as the film draws to its end. Larraín is also not afraid to make effective use of silence – there are large swathes of film with no music at all. The moment where Onassis, superbly acted by Haluk Bilginer, informs Callas at their first meeting that they will become a couple, is magnetic, an effect created by the temporary stripping-out of all background noise.

The cinematography of Edward Lachman is stunning. Wood-panelled and cavernous in scale, filled with Grecian busts, costumed mannequins and framed photographs of past triumphs, Callas’s apartment is more of a museum than a home – a monument to herself. Painstaking attention has been paid to detail in recreating her actual apartment, as well as her outfits, and the film crew were even able to use Onassis’s yacht. ‘Paris’ (some scenes were shot in Budapest), as summer gives way to autumn, is shot through a hazy, unmistakably 1970s filter tinged with browns, salmon shades and baby blue. Black and white flashbacks to an elegant 1959 party or an encounter in a restaurant with JFK drip with elegance. La Scala looks divine.

Naturally, the film manipulates us. Everything is hyper-aestheticised. Jolie, aged 48 at the time of filming, is of course too beautiful, too youthful-looking to represent Callas at 53. And the diva’s love life is given a fairy-tale status it doesn’t quite deserve. A supporting character’s observation about the dying Onassis – ‘Jackie was his wife, but you – you were his life’ – seems the most romantic line in the world until you remember the utter callousness of the man. But this is a film about opera: it must borrow opera’s clever tricks and deceptions. And so, when we leave the cinema, we walk out blinking and disorientated into a world that, in comparison, seems impossibly flat and dull.