Old Yorker

  • Gloria (2013)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sebastián Lelio (2013)

    Gloria Cumplido (Paulina García) has been divorced for twelve years.  It seems she’s been a fixture on the Santiago singles club scene for much of that time without having any long-lasting relationships.  This Chilean-Spanish film, which the director Sebastián Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, tells the story of what happens after Gloria, one evening in the singles club, locks eyes with a man who changes all that.  She has a grown-up son and daughter, a baby grandson, a job, a social life beyond the singles bars.  Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), the man with whom she starts a relationship, has been divorced for only a year; he keeps Gloria such a secret from his two daughters and his ex-wife that she’s soon suspicious he may not be divorced at all.   Paulina García is in nearly every frame of the film and she’s absorbing to watch.  She gives Gloria a very distinctive quality of wary flirtatiousness.  She makes her seem tipsy even when Gloria’s not had a drink (although she has plenty of drinks in the course of the film); and switches easily into a contrasting and intriguing anonymity.   But the plotting of Gloria is exasperating.

    Gloria isn’t glamorous but she’s hardly a frump; she’s neither socially not sexually inhibited.  If she’s anxious not to live alone, it’s hard to credit that she hadn’t found a suitable candidate before Rodolfo – I didn’t believe either that she would be irresistibly attracted to this man.  (According to Wikipedia, he’s meant to be seven or eight years older than Gloria.  The age difference looks to be more than that – even though Sergio Hernández is in fact only three years older than Paulina García.)   Rodolfo disappears from Gloria’s son Pedro’s birthday party without telling her or anyone else; Gloria is understandably angry and, although Rodolfo pleads with her, she refuses to see him again.   One day – shortly after her daughter Ana has gone to live in Sweden with the young man whose child she’s now carrying – Gloria is in a shopping mall.   She hears tinny music and is curious to find out what a group of people, gathered at the spot where the music’s coming from, are watching.  It’s a busker with a skeleton marionette and the puppet’s solo dance of death sends Gloria back to Rodolfo.

    It’s believable that Ana’s departure and the memento mori in the mall would impel Gloria to seize the day (she kneels conspicuously to give coins to the busker) – but why with Rodolfo, who of course deserts her again, this time midway through their romantic weekend in a swanky hotel at a coastal resort?  The answer seems to be that Sebastián Lelio needs to crank up Gloria’s misfortunes in order to cause her to rethink her life and deliver a big finish.  The closing stages of Gloria are effective in the moment but Lelio arrives at them through a storyline that’s not only contrived but exposed as such because it doesn’t make sense in relation to the convincing character that his lead actress has created.

    In a conversation about Chilean politics, at the dinner table of friends of Gloria, Rodolfo laments the country’s lack of strong leaders nowadays.  Rodolfo is an ex-naval officer, who now owns an amusement park with some sort-of military attractions like paintball:  I thought at first that his secretiveness was going to be connected to a previous existence as a Pinochet henchman but Rodolfo’s shadiness turns out to be no more than marital.  After his second desertion and its lurid aftermath – the heroine gets drunk, has a one-night stand with another man and wakes up the morning after on a deserted beach – Gloria goes back home to Santiago.  She ups her dose of the drugs which her loco neighbour, who spends his days bawling misogynist abuse and threatening suicide, left outside Gloria’s door one night when he couldn’t find his own apartment.   Gloria is by now so resigned to failure that she starts to make welcome a furless cat whose earlier visits got on her nerves; then its owner, the noisy neighbour, comes to reclaim the cat.

    This is followed by the most enjoyable sequence in the film:  in her climactic paintball attack on Rodolfo and his family home, this viewer got angry frustration out of his system just as Gloria did.  The most engrossing episode – because of the various emotional cross-currents in evidence – is Pedro’s birthday party. This is Gloria’s first meeting with her ex-husband Gabriel since their divorce; we’re told the idea for the reunion came from Gabriel’s new wife Flavia.  (I inferred that a social event of this kind hadn’t happened before because Gloria wouldn’t have had a partner to bring with her, although this may be wrong. Other things I didn’t understand included why Pedro was bringing up his son alone and where the boy’s mother had got to – and whether Gloria realised from the start who the Sphynx cat belonged to.)   The evidence of this gathering is that Gloria has never chosen well:  Gabriel (Alejandro Goic) is drearily vain and self-centred – it’s believable this man would leave his wife for a younger model.

    Gloria takes off her spectacles only when she goes to sleep.  Halfway through the film, she goes for an eye test and learns she has glaucoma and must take eye drops every day for the rest of her life.  At the start of the story, driving in her car, she sings along to songs on the radio – songs with lyrics about wanting somebody to love and be loved by.  (Once the affair with Rodolfo is underway, this starry-eyed view of love is displaced and the singing stops – but you remember it each time you see Gloria at the wheel of her car.)  She takes her paintball revenge en route to the wedding reception of her friends’ daughter.  At the reception, as in the skeleton scene, she’s drawn to the sound of music and to a group of people involved with the music:  the song playing is ‘Gloria’ (Laura Branigan had a hit with the English-language version in the early 1980s); the dancers to it are mostly women.   Gloria removes her spectacles and joins them.   (This was a relief partly because, dressed up for the occasion, she somewhat resembled Dustin Hoffman in drag in Tootsie until the glasses came off.)

    Gloria dances without a partner – it’s a reminder that, when she first met Rodolfo, she told him she liked dancing on her own.  The song lyric on the soundtrack is no longer about a dream lover but about a woman called Gloria – herself.  The implication is that she’s learned, through her experience with Rodolfo, that she was blind even with her specs on and will now manage on her own (even though she’s aging and her eyesight’s getting worse).  This gives Gloria a final flourish but it doesn’t bear much scrutiny.   Gloria’s a woman who evidently feels the need for a man and has to express that need.  How does that stop because Rodolfo was a heel?

    20 October 2013

  • Ginger & Rosa

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sally Potter (2012)

    By coincidence, I saw Ginger & Rosa on the forty-sixth anniversary of Aberfan, the event which, like no other, sparked fear of death in me as a child.  It wasn’t the first time I’d been horrified by the thought of death;  it was the first time that the panic came from an event which killed others – many others, most of them children of my own age or younger.  I’d been aware for two or three years what a large-scale disaster was likely to mean.  I can remember thinking there would be a war, and that my family and I would all die in the war.  I don’t remember thinking of this explicitly as a nuclear war but I knew that the end would come suddenly and irresistibly.  It was the realisation that this might not be the way that death intervened – that the people closest to me might not die (and go to heaven) in the very same moment that I did – that had started nagging at me in the late summer and early autumn of 1966.  Aberfan crystallised these fears.   Sally Potter’s new film is about the intersection of a teenage girl’s growing awareness of her own mortality and the prospect of a nuclear holocaust.  It also dramatises the protagonist Ginger’s apprehension of ends of the world both global and personal:  with the Cuban missiles crisis at its height, the father whom Ginger idolises is shown in his true colours.  The movie opens with footage of Hiroshima from which Potter cuts to what’s happening on the other side of the world on 6 August 1945:  in a London maternity ward Ginger and Rosa are born.  The mushroom cloud casts a long shadow.  Seventeen years later Ginger is prey to persistent fears of apocalypse.

    Ginger & Rosa was released in this country on 19 October 2012, presumably to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the thirteen-day Cuban missiles crisis.  The crisis began on 15 October 1962; three days before that, Sylvia Plath completed ‘Daddy’ and, in an introduction written for a BBC radio broadcast, explained that ‘The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex’.   Ginger also writes poetry and her adored father Roland is near enough a fantasy figure – handsome, clever (he’s an academic), a pacifist who once went to jail for his views and who’s now a CND activist.  Roland is indulgently permissive in dealing with Ginger’s uncertainly rebellious behaviour.  Her mother Natalie, an artist manqué, is an anxious spoilsport for whom Ginger and her father share an impatient contempt.  Ginger’s best – it seems her only – friend is Rosa.  They don’t go to the same school because Rosa failed her eleven plus but they’re otherwise inseparable:  according to the Wikipedia synopsis of the film, they ‘discuss religion, politics and hairstyles, and dream of lives bigger than their mothers’ frustrated domesticity’.  ‘Daddy’ is probably Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, and certainly her most notoriously autobiographical one, but she didn’t imagine a crisis for her Electra as florid as the one that Sally Potter comes up with here.   As the skies of Ginger’s world continue to darken, Roland moves out of the family home and starts a relationship with Rosa.  While the world holds its breath over Cuba, Ginger learns from Rosa that she’s carrying Roland’s baby.

    The introduction to the Time Out review of the film online summarises it as follows:

    ‘In Sally Potter’s latest drama two teenage girls, Ginger and Rosa – born on same day in 1945 when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima – come of age as London starts to swing.’

    Although she’s explicit that the nuclear age, Ginger and Rosa are exact contemporaries, Potter still tries to be imprecise about how old the two girls are.   Ginger is played by fourteen-year-old Elle Fanning, Rosa by Alice Englert (Jane Campion’s daughter), who’s making her screen debut but is in fact four years older than Fanning.  In an early scene the two friends sit facing each other in a bath, shrinking their jeans:  Rosa is reading the comic Girl, Ginger a book with Simone de Beauvoir’s name on the cover.   You feel that neither Ginger nor Rosa – girls who are proud of being intelligently ‘different’ – would be seen dead reading Girl, even for a laugh, but Potter’s priority is presumably to remind the audience of the cultural importance of Girl during the 1950s and (slightly) beyond.  Ginger’s age weakens the basis of the film.  If she’s seventeen in August 1962 the seemingly recent arrival of death in her mental life is not only unremarkable but verging on retarded.  Elle Fanning seems younger than seventeen, though, and I think that Potter wanted it that way.  She herself was thirteen in 1962 and she may be drawing on her own memories in Ginger & Rosa.  More important, Fanning’s early adolescence makes Ginger’s fear more poignant and the sexual element in her feelings about her father less challenging.  In contrast, the fact that  Alice Englert looks her age makes Roland’s affair with Rosa less shocking than it might otherwise be.  (Ginger & Rosa turns out to be topical in another and unforeseen way, however, and Roland’s having sex with a minor to be unfortunately resonant.  Potter’s impeccably cool selection of music includes ‘The Man I Love’, which some of us won’t easily forget was the theme tune to the radio show Savile’s Travels.)

    Sally Potter’s screenplay is full of purplish, statement-making dialogue.  She increasingly ridicules Roland through the silver-tongued crap that he talks but it’s not easily distinguishable from what issues from the mouths of other, more sincere characters – even if some of the actors in smaller roles are good enough to disguise this, Timothy Spall and Annette Bening particularly.  Spall is one of Ginger’s two gay godfathers (Oliver Platt is the other).  I didn’t really get who Bening’s character was but with the spectacles she wears she must be meant to be an intellectual of sorts.  It’s frustrating that the writing of the character of Roland makes him so transparent from an early stage:  Alessandro Nivola has a subtlety that could have kept things in doubt for much longer.  Potter delays the conflict between Ginger and Rosa artificially and there are some implausible bits of plotting.  Literally following in her father’s footsteps at a CND rally, Ginger appears to be the only person arrested at it – presumably so that she can then have a scene in a police cell.   Sally Potter isn’t known for realism and she may well despise it – yet any impact that Ginger & Rosa has depends almost entirely on the viewer’s believing in the realness of Ginger’s experiences.  Truth created through realistic acting is what Potter gets from Elle Fanning but it’s diluted by the writer-director’s failure to place Ginger in a credible situation.  Jodhi May is Rosa’s mother; as Ginger’s, Christina Hendricks seems uncomfortable not only with an English accent but with the character as a whole yet she has some oddly affecting moments.

    21 October 2012

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