★★★★★ by Dylan Jones
Chilean director Sebastiàn Lelio made an unforgettable splash last year with A Fantastic Woman – a glittering, dreamy portrait of a trans woman’s life and loves in Santiago; it had universal critical acclaim, breezily picking up the Academy Award for best foreign language film. And now he’s back with Gloria Bell, a film so similar – not in subject matter but in its aesthetics and feel – that it could almost be considered a follow-up or partner project.
Gloria is a slightly forgotten, upper middle-aged lady living in Los Angeles. Her kids are flying the nest – the daughter heading to Sweden, the son throwing himself headfirst into marriage and kids. She has a good relationship with their father, her ex-husband, but he’s moving on too now, marrying his long-term partner.
There’s a feeling that she’s been left behind. She goes through the motions at her banal office job and seems happy enough, but there’s something missing. She goes to singles bars to meet guys, and she’s good at it, but it’s mostly unrewarding.
Julianne Moore brings an incredible, unique energy to the character. She plays her with an intriguing mix of befuddlement and assertiveness – perpetually confused, but quietly confident. Gloria is not making the most of her life, and she’s frustrated that she can’t figure out why. There’s also the fact that she doesn’t have anyone to be close with anymore. It is in many ways a film about loneliness and when she feels that loneliness, it’s visceral – there are moments that are genuinely heart-wrenching.
Then a love interest arrives, Arnold – played with charming, wet-eyed adulation by John Turturro. Arnold treats Gloria very well and clearly loves her, but has glaring flaws rooted in his own insecurities, like lack of confidence and pervading unwillingness to say no to his daughters and ex-wife. Both characters are painfully held back by their inability to figure out their issues and in a wider sense, figure out their lives.
Despite some rather bleak emotional themes, this is an uplifting film. The whole thing has a warm, dreamy sheen, paired with an irresistible comedic energy from both Moore and Turturro (Holland Taylor also makes a brief, hilarious and very welcome appearance as Gloria’s mother).
The sunny tone is also down to the use of sound – Lelio wielded it with ingenious artistry in A Fantastic Woman, and now he harnesses it again with possibly even better results – there’s a dreamlike twinkly jangle that pops up often, usually as a scene changes, and it gives the otherwise quite realist tone a fairytale-like quality.
He’s also clearly fond of nightlife as a tool; A Fantastic Woman was brimming with glittering, unforgettable clubbing scenes and they feature heavily again here, both as narrative tools and as sonorous feasts. Beats and hooks thrum in and out, conveying passion and confusion, undulating to match the characters’ feelings.
Despite keeping things relatively rooted in realism for much of the film, some of the most memorable, joyful and satisfying moments are when Lelio allows the character of Gloria to come out of her shell and lose inhibitions. She has a fairly eventful night in Las Vegas that’s portrayed with indulgent, glowing sympathy, and there’s a particular scene towards the end involving a paintball gun that’s fabulous with a big fat capital F.
The story this film tells often isn’t told in cinema , which is interesting because it’s perhaps the most common story of all – a person who lives a life of…not much. Not much happens to Gloria. She’s just an average lady with an average life, like millions of other people in the world. And it’s this simplicity that makes Gloria Bell so empathic and wonderful.
Gloria Bell is out in selected UK cinemas on 7th June.
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