Before ‘Maria,’ ‘Marlene’ Took on a Faded Star’s Electric Verbal Sparring with an Interviewer

A cultural icon rattles around in her Paris apartment, at loose ends without her career, and verbally jousting with a younger man there to interrogate her about her life and work. At turns crafty, seductive, imperious, and heartbroken, she inadvertently reveals far more about herself than her guarded replies would indicate.

That’s an apt summary of one subplot in Pablo Larraín’s masterful “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as opera diva Maria Callas in the last week of her life, but it’s also true of Maximilian Schell’s Oscar-nominated 1984 documentary “Marlene,” about the once glamorous, then reclusive Marlene Dietrich.

Currently streaming on Kanopy, Schell’s documentary feels in conversation with Larraín’s portrait of a diva in freefall, though the fictional Maria is more engaged with living than the prickly, 80-year-old Dietrich seems. The interlocutor and his subject worked together in Stanley Kramer’s 1961 “Judgment at Nuremberg,” and their friendship helped cement Dietrich’s participation in the documentary. But that didn’t mean she’d make it easy for Schell. Starting by refusing to be filmed on camera.

Instead, as she brings up repeatedly during their conversations, she signed a contract for 40 hours of audio-only interviews. But even that was enough for the full scope of Dietrich’s larger-than-life star persona to take shape on screen, as Schell plays revealing exchanges over relevant footage from her films, her concerts, and her public appearances. If he never corrects her sometimes outlandish statements, the editing does it for him.

The Maria Callas in Steven Knight’s script is almost coquettish as she parries and thrusts with Kodi Smit-McPhee’s documentary filmmaker, Mandrax, named for the sedatives Callas is hooked on; Dietrich is more often annoyed bordering on furious. “You should go back to Mama Schell and learn some manners,” she snarls at one point. At another, she stoutly denies having a sister, as Schell cuts to a photo of Dietrich and her very real sister as children. (The truth came out much later: Dietrich’s sister and her brother-in-law ran a movie theater for Nazi officers outside of the Bergen-Belsen death camp, after which Dietrich elided her from her official history.)

But Dietrich is rough on herself, too. Maria remains certain of her (now-diminished) talent, but Dietrich dismisses almost everything she was in. (An exception: She claims that “The Devil Is a Woman” was her best film.) “I wasn’t erotic, I was snotty,” she declaims at one point, a claim that somehow manages to be both simultaneously. At another, she shrugs that she was never very good and, when Schell demurs that she is underestimating herself, she tersely replies, “I didn’t underestimate myself. And I know what wonderful was.”

Dietrich seemed convinced that she’d already spoken definitively about her life and career in what she repeatedly refers to as “my book.” But the book she which Schell never explains is not the usual ghostwritten memoir of a Hollywood star that was and remains de rigueur. Instead, “Marlene Dietrich‘s ABCs” is a rollicking collection of aphorisms, one-liners, and haughtiness that ranges from “Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact” to “Forgiveness: Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.” The book is as calculatedly revealing as Dietrich ostensibly intended her voice-only command performance to be — during the latter, however, she outwitted herself and unintentionally allowed a peek behind the curtain.

That never quite happens in “Maria,” but Jolie’s Maria seems more engaged with coming to terms with her past than in disguising it. What both films share is giving the fictional Callas and the real Dietrich one final hurrah as themselves, after decades of playing other roles, tributes to grit, determination, talent, and a bigger-than-life approach to love and work.

Dietrich lived another eight years after Schell’s documentary, though she never again engaged in a project of similar scale, effectively turning the project into a testy, glorious swan song worthy of a complicated icon.

“Marlene” is available to stream on Kanopy. “Maria” plays in select theaters beginning November 27 and stream on Netflix December 11.