Glo­ria

The glo­ry of Glo­ria comes from the slow-burn­ing but pas­sion­ate appre­ci­a­tion direc­tor Sebastián Lelio shows for the depths of a 58-year-old woman liv­ing in Chile, a demo­graph­ic that remains some­thing of a no-man’s‑land in cinema.

Pauli­na Gar­cía won the Sil­ver Bear in Berlin for embody­ing this appar­ent­ly calm moth­er. She has var­i­ous grown-up chil­dren, dot­ted around the city. With a face con­cealed with owl-like specs, Glo­ria pos­sess­es the rare abil­i­ty to lis­ten impas­sive­ly, walk­ing through life with the mys­ter­ies of her inner-self intact. Only when she devi­ates from con­ven­tion­al­ly ​‘age-appro­pri­ate’ pur­suits like work or yoga or fam­i­ly, head­ing to a night­club where she dances and courts the male gaze, do we sense her inter­est­ing appetites.

Whether the film’s title is inspired by John Cas­savetes’ 1980 vehi­cle for his mis­sus and muse, Gena Row­lands, is up for debate, but the influ­ence is felt in the long takes cap­tur­ing per­son­al scenes and the incre­men­tal pro­gres­sion of a nat­u­ral­is­tic sto­ry. At times it seems a lit­tle slow. The sink­ing feel­ing that this is a promis­ing char­ac­ter study bogged down by styl­is­tic ennui hits around the mid-point, but before all hope is lost, events pick up and for the final act it becomes appar­ent that the placid but pur­pose­ful Glo­ria is a thrilling­ly unknow­able figure.

Ignit­ing the wild side of Glo­ria is Rodol­fo (Ser­gio Hernán­dez), a bale­ful ex-navel offi­cer. Hav­ing recent­ly shed a wife and a shit-tonne of weight, Rodol­fo has not yet accus­tomed him­self to a lighter life when Glo­ria catch­es his eye down at the dis­co. Hernán­dez is both plau­si­ble and pathet­ic as a man caught in the push/​pull vor­tex of duty and desire. In the beam of his fancy-woman’s sto­ic con­ti­nu­ity, he seems weak. Still their rela­tion­ship is han­dled del­i­cate­ly and with an intu­itive com­pas­sion flow­ing between the lovers at all times, except dur­ing one tri­umphant­ly messy shot.

But their rela­tion­ship is scarce­ly the point of this film. As the catchy title song extols: ​“Glo­ria! Glo­ria!” Her char­ac­ter is all the more reward­ing because it takes so long to ful­ly emerge. Gar­cía has a timid­i­ty that allows sur­round­ings to colour her char­ac­ter. We need to see her in the con­text of each new set­ting before the pic­ture is complete.

In a scene with a doc­tor she seems vul­ner­a­ble but when danc­ing she is a free woman with the future at her shim­my­ing feet. Gar­cía gives her­self over to a sto­ry that is basi­cal­ly an emo­tion­al striptease. Dis­cov­er­ing that Lelio wrote the film with her in mind and allowed her to take deci­sions at every stage explains the raw alche­my of her per­for­mance. There is a trans­fix­ing desire bub­bling in Glo­ria — and by exten­sion her cre­ators Gar­cia and Lelio — that puts forth the empow­er­ing notion that who­ev­er we are is exact­ly who we’re meant to be.