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Gloria Bell
****
Dir: Sebastian Lelio
Starring: Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Michael Cera
(USA, 15, 1hr 42mins)
Julianne Moore is captivating as the title character in Sebastian Lelio’s American remake of his own female-centred Chilean drama Gloria from 2013. Moore plays the fifty-something free spirit, a divorced mother of two grown-up children (Michael Cera and Alanna Ubach) who split with her husband (Brad Garrett) ten years ago.
He has subsequently remarried but she is still looking for someone she can spend her life with, but on her own terms. She meets Arnold (an excellent John Turturro), a paintball enthusiast at a club for older singletons. He is needy and conflicted, still in the grips of his own past relationship, fears falling in love again and whether he deserves Gloria at all.
These are wonderful three-dimensional relationships captured with subtle alacrity by Lelio and Moore’s bespectacled Gloria is a force of sensitive nature. Although this is more or less a shot-for-shot remake of the original, Moore’s performance differs from the award-winning Paulina Garcia’s, impacting all characters around her.
She carries the film with understatement and quiet determination; her loneliness as retirement looms disappears as she dances with abandon in nightclubs. She is comfortable in her own skin whilst others are not and has adapted to her post-divorce life whereas Turturro’s character struggles. Director Lelio may have lost the Chilean backdrop with its post-Pinochet specificities to a broader, more generic canvas, but the universality of a woman making her way at a certain time of her life still rings resoundingly true.
Moore’s Gloria is someone to root for, whether she is embarrassed by her boyfriend disappearing from a family gathering, getting a bikini wax or offering and absorbing advice, she’s utterly engaging.
words Keiron Self
Opens June 6