The Chilean drama Gloria is a lovely surprise. Paulina Garcia plays Gloria, 58 years old, middle class, 10 years divorced. We first see her sitting at the bar at a single’s event for older people. She wears big, round glasses like the specs worn by Dustin Hoffman as Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie. Her aloneness comes through vividly, yet she waits with a kind of equanimity.
The music is vintage disco and it seems to keep her buoyant — and the movie buoyant too. It is a lonely life. Her son is emotionally distant, her daughter who teaches yoga, is absorbed in a new relationship with a roving Swede. The streets of Santiago are full of young demonstrators. Her intellectual friends argue nervously about the country’s future.
In the flat above her, an unseen man rants into the night, his grasp of reality tenuous. His cat has wandered into Gloria’s apartment — a skeletal, hairless beast that she feeds. Most unsettling. But when Gloria drives through the city, she sings along to pop songs full of hope.
Paulina Garcia is well known in Chile as a TV actress, a playwright, and a director. She’s new to me, but now I’ll go see her in anything. What makes her performance so wonderful is how she portrays a state of flux. She is always game, always slightly wary. Never quite sure of her place in the world. The more you get to know her the more fascinating she becomes.
And we don’t meet women like Gloria enough in movies. An older man named Rodolfo, played by Sergio Hernandez, fastens onto her. He’s a retired navy man who owns a sort of fun center — paintball games and the like. His passion is hard for Gloria to resist. But there are worrying signs. There’s something pleading in his demeanor. And he’s besieged by calls from his ex-wife and overly dependent grown daughters.
