Sebastián Lelio (2018)
There are two audiences for Gloria Bell: those who haven’t seen Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria (2013) and those who have. If (like me) you’re in the latter category, it’s impossible to clear your mind of the earlier film and puzzling as to what impelled Lelio to retell a story he’d told so recently in a Chilean setting and with a Chilean cast. The action has shifted from Santiago to Los Angeles but the characters and plot are virtually unchanged. (Lelio now shares the screenplay credit with Alice Johnson Boher rather than Gonzalo Maza but you wonder if the new co-writer’s job amounted to translating rather than creating dialogue.) Gloria Bell doesn’t reveal significant differences between the circumstances of a late-middle-aged American divorcee with grown-up children and those of her Chilean counterpart in the original film. Gloria was an international succès d’estime: it’s hard to see a good case for a Hollywood remake except that it promises commercial success in the Anglophone market on a scale inevitably beyond the foreign language version. That promise is greater now than it was when the Americanisation of Gloria got underway in early 2017 because this is another tale of male weakness and villainy that leads, through female victimhood, to female empowerment.
The new film has Julianne Moore in the title role and the Wikipedia article on Gloria Bell quotes Lelio (at the time the remake was announced) as follows: ‘As one of the greatest actresses in the world, Julianne giving her interpretation of the character is not only a huge honor, it’s irresistible. It’s going to be like jazz, you’ll feel the spirit of the original story but it’ll be re-invigorated and vital’. Lelio probably didn’t mean to but his words implicitly disparage Paulina García, who gave a powerful (and memorable) lead performance in Gloria. Julianne Moore is deft and emotionally fine-tuned but her casting throws into sharper relief the shaky premise of the story, which came through strongly enough in the original. Paulina García managed to be both plain and attractive; Moore is incontrovertibly beautiful. When the man with whom Gloria gets into a relationship lets her down, she decides to give him a second chance after she happens on a street entertainer with a dancing skeleton puppet – a memento mori that reminds her to seize the day. But why does Moore’s Gloria think Arnold (John Turturro) is the only possible way of doing that? There’s nothing to suggest that she doesn’t realise she looks great. She’s very sociable. She could have her pick of men at the clubs where she and they regularly go to dance and chat. García’s spectacles in Gloria arguably increase her attractiveness, as well as signal symbolically that the character isn’t seeing things clearly. The glasses in Moore’s case virtually revive the venerable Hollywood cliché of the romantic heroine whose specs supposedly disguise her beauty.
Gloria Bell is not like jazz. That would normally be no bad thing but the prevailing tone of the narrative is muted, verging on glum. You shouldn’t judge a film by its trailer but this one is a good deal less animated than its two-minute summary promises: what energy there is, is thanks mostly to the selection of well-known pop songs on the soundtrack. John Turturro has nothing of the deceptively paternal quality that Sergio Hernández’s Rodolfo had in Gloria. (The American leads are much closer in actual age than the Chileans were.) Perhaps Lelio uses the same shot to introduce Arnold as he used to introduce Rodolfo and the effect is different only because Turturro is a familiar face as Hernández wasn’t: whatever the reason, the first appearance of Arnold sitting at a club bar feels too emphatic – here’s the main male character, it announces. From an early stage, Turturro’s Arnold is edgy and shifty. He rarely seems to offer Gloria the possibility of short-term, let alone long-term, happiness. In one of their more relaxed moments together, he reads aloud to her an English translation of a poem by Claudio Bertoni. I’m revealing my own prejudices here but it’s a bit surprising that a Second Amendment-supporting American businessman has a taste for Chilean poetry.
18 June 2019
