Gloria

In Sebastian Lelio’s Gloria the heroine is a fiftyish Chilean divorcee who has an indomitable sense of life, self and joy. At first Gloria (Pauline Garcio) is out dancing, looking for a man, and she attracts a recent divorcee with her look of radiant joy. The film closes on her exuberant self-celebration at a friend’s wedding, where everyone sings and dances to the song “Gloria.” The difference is that here she declines a younger man’s invitation to dance and instead goes in to dance by herself in the crowd.  

What happens between those dances is her experience with a rather nice man who is quite her opposite. Where her grown children never call her, Rodolfo’s (Sergio Hernandez) two daughters constantly interrupt him with their demands. Yet they neglected him entirely when he had weight-reduction surgery. That surgery liberated Rodolfo physically but he lags behind Gloria in internal freedom. He wears a corset (heard but not seen) to hold his insides together. Where Gloria and her children are healthily independent, his ex-wife and their two daughters are completely dependent upon him financially and emotionally — and he seems dependent upon their dependency.  “Grow a pair,” Gloria sensibly admonishes him.

Rodolfo abandons Gloria at her son’s birthday party inexcusably but understandably: she focuses entirely on her family, not her guest, when she brings him, insensitive to his reliance on the only person there he knows. It’s as if she has no sense of such needs. His second abandonment — at an expensive hotel — introduces her to neediness, as she has to call on an older woman friend to bail her out.

Gloria is a remarkable heroine because of her her resilience, her resolve to enjoy herself and her life. Her solidity contrasts to the agonized younger man in the apartment upstairs. To his credit, as Gloria Lelio cast an actor who is not the usual film beauty; indeed she shows the increasing effects of age. The sex scenes are lyrical but clear-eyed, refusing to hide or romanticize the sagging sallow flesh. As an extension of this self-acceptance the film features two starkly white animals, a furless cat and an albino peacock. Gloria comes to accept the eerie cat and takes heart from contemplating the freakish peacock, finding in them a reflection of her own outsider’s nature. All three are suis generis.

Gloria’s prescription of daily eyedrops to ward off glaucoma provides a metaphor for her necessary adjustment in vision. The pleasure and pain Rodolfo provides shows her she is essentially on her own now and has to make her own dance through life, without hoping to be rescued by some man.  
     Gloria’s personal revolution plays against a political one in Chile. Post-Pinochet the young revolutionaries reject the new society’s materialism and greed. They find their country a simulacrum of a culture, not one based on valid values. In parallel liberations they reaffirm their national self and Gloria affirms her own.