Gloria 2013

No not the wonderful John Cassavettes-Gena Rowlands film but still an equally wonderful Gloria. This smart and moving little film from Chile tells the story of an average middle age divorced woman who is lonely and spends her evenings at Discos full of other lonely middle aged and even older men and women who dance and drink the night away. Gloria is average looking but at times because of her vibrant personality she glows and shines. Played by the wonderful (and new to me) actress Paulina Garcia who gives a deep and touching performance that might very well be my favorite female performance of the year. She’s a mixture of Giulietta Messina and Anna Magnani but without mimicking those two great women. Her days are spent working at some unknown job and she sometimes sees her two grown children but not that often, and sometimes has sleepless nights because of a rowdy drug addled upstairs neighbor. One night at the disco she meets a somewhat older man, and they start an intense and difficult relationship. There is off handed nudity and sexual scenes that are presented in a no big deal way they simply are and the bodies shown are the bodies of older people, flabby and flawed but this is how we age. Gloria makes mistakes one, which causes her to wake up on a beach without her shoes or purse after a drunken night on the night in some small Chilean resort. The director Sebastian Lelio is well aware of the dark political past in Chile but doesn’t hit us over the head with it, instead there are some telling subtle moments dropped here and there, and I don’t think I’ll be giving away much if I say that the movie ends at a wedding with a Chilean version of the disco hit “Gloria” blaring away as Paulina dances beautifully to the beat. One of the best films I’ve seen about a woman in a long time.