“A divorced woman in her late 50s recaptures her life in Sebastián Lelio’s pitch-perfect, terrifically written Gloria.” — Variety. The enormously appealing Paulina García won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Festival.
A divorced woman in her late 50s recaptures her life in Sebastian Lelio’s pitch-perfect, terrifically written Gloria.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2013
Gloria 2012
“It’s hard to imagine anyone with a heart and a brain not responding to the quiet delights and stunning intimacy of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s account of the personal evolution of a 58-year-old divorcee, played with scrupulous honesty and intelligence by the wonderful Paulina García.
A large part of the cumulative joy of this movie is considering all the ways in which the story might have been mishandled. Midlife sexual desire, second-chance romance, the hunger for companionship, the challenging path toward self-reliance – these are all potential minefields ready to set off explosions of mawkish cliché. But Gloria is a work of maturity, depth and emotional insight…
Still attractive and well put-together, but in a way that suggests a lack of vanity or the standard terror of aging, Gloria holds down a decent job and invariably is the one to make the effort to see her grown children… Divorced more than a decade ago, Gloria is much too level-headed to sit around moping in self-pity, but clearly something is missing. That threatens to change when she meets Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez), a soft-spoken gent with a puppy-dog air, whose marriage ended more recently…
Gloria is reinvigorated by the relationship yet is not the type to get all girly and airborne, even as Rodolfo reads her love poems in bed. She’s aware that he comes with baggage…
Onscreen for the duration in a story seen entirely from Gloria’s perspective, García is remarkable, not least for the rigorous unshowiness and integrity of her self-possessed performance. She sets the tone for a gently humorous melodrama that’s refreshingly grown-up.” — David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter