Life-Affirming Gloria a Universal Love Story
The best thing about writer/director Sebastián Lelio‘s Chilean import Gloria is its strong-willed, almost fearless simplicity. Co-written with Gonzalo Maza, the movie is as honest a depiction of middle-aged life, romance, family and love as anything to be released in quite some time, everything happening with a dynamic, straightforward exactitude that allows the inherent humor and emotion integral to this story to bubble forth with ebullient ease.
PHOTO: Roadside Attractions
Santiago single Gloria (Paulina García) has been divorced for some time. She’s the one chasing down her children, eldest Pedro (Diego Fontecilla), a single father of one, and flighty, yoga instructor daughter Ana (Fabiola Zamora), in order to spend time with them. Intelligent and intuitive, confident and self-reliant, while Gloria doesn’t mope around pitying her lot in life at the same time she does realize there is something missing, and while romance isn’t a priority finding someone to share the remainder of her life with would admittedly be nice.
Told entirely from her point of view, Gloria never breaks, never bends, the movie allowing its titular character to blossom and evolve slowly and assuredly throughout its entire 110-minute narrative. The relationship that ends up developing between the heroine and recent divorcé Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez) is refreshing in its brevity, things happening between the two of them with a naturalistic grace that’s pleasigly intoxicating. Lelio doesn’t stoop to using mawkish melodramatics or cliché theatrics to pull emotional responses out of the viewer, thus the tears that flowed from the corners of my eyes felt all the more potent as they cathartically dripped down my cheek.
García is superb. In virtually every scene, the actress never overdoes it or pushes things to any type of extreme in order to find the inherent truth in each and every moment. Her interactions with Hernandez are so strong, so beautifully minimalistic, their romance can’t help but have the air of something invigoratingly fresh even if the core mechanics giving it life are hardly original. García brings all of this to life with a nakedly raw simplicity that’s magnificent, delivering the type of breathtaking performance that will undoubtedly stand the test.
PHOTO: Roadside Attractions
Not that Lelio and Maza are exactly offering up anything new, and I can’t say I was shocked or surprised by where the pair deigned to take me. Additionally, while Pedro’s subplot, told in sparse, understated brushstrokes, felt genuine, I can’t say the same about events affecting Ana, her dalliances the only part of the film that carry an air of glossy cinematic absurdity that I had at least small amounts of trouble relating to.
Overall, however, Gloria is a stunning masterwork told with passionate confidence, the whole thing anchored by a performance from García that’s titanic in its self-contained luminosity. The actress is incredible, as are Lelio’s staging of the core dramatics at the heart of her character’s tale, this film a marvelous achievement overflowing in humor, heart and heroics viewers the world over will hopefully relate to and happily embrace.
Film Rating: 3½ (out of 4)
