Five minutes into Gloria, the Chilean entry for Best Foreign Language Film for next year's Academy Awards, I figured Pablo Lorrain had to be involved in it in some shape or form. The end credits confirmed my suspicions: there was the Tony Manero and Post Morten director in a producer role and there is no surprise why he was attracted to the material: Sebastian Lelio's honest portrait of a lonely character is set against a commentary on Chile. That's Larrain in a nutshell. However, Lelio is no mere mimic as he seems more interested in heart and warmth that Larrain’s cold outsiders.
Gloria is a fifty-something divorced grandmother who spends her nights at the local disco trying to catch the eye of single men. More often than not however she retreats to her apartment alone, where she’s kept awake by the man upstairs who sounds like he is having a nervous breakdown. Yoga and singing to sentimental pop songs in her car stave off loneliness until she meets the kind Radolfo (Hernandez), but his ties to his ex-wife and his two loser daughters has a strain on the burgeoning relationship.
At first it can be hard to see what it was about this character that so inspired writer Gonzalo Maza to explore her in a script; maybe it's her ordinariness, maybe he was curious to write about a character who doesn't have anything that sets her apart from everyone else. Gloria is Gloria. She's a grandmother, she's pleasant to her ex's new wife, and is prepared to accept some questionable behaviour from Radolfo when she knows she would have done better than him years before. But that was before and this is now and she thinks she has to make do.
It's testament to the deft writing that none of this is ever highlighted in any way in the dialogue. But it's there. It's there in the layers. It's there when she pauses at the hotel room door, a moment away from walking out on Radolfo, that she stops and turns around. There might be no consistent conflict to push her but the story asks questions of her in quieter, more subtle ways. While it’s refreshing to see characters like this on film, the lack of drive, of ambition on her part, can halt momentum at times.
The wonderful Paulina Garcia inhabits the skin of Gloria. A brave, intoxicating performance that's deserving of her Silver Bear for Best Actress at this year's Berlin Film Festival