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