Divorced 58-year-old Gloria (Paulina García) hits the single scene where she meets Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), a charming man who runs an amusement park… but there are trust issues. This drama takes a sympathetic look at a lonely, middle-aged woman’s attempt to get back in the dating game and how she handles the inevitable obstacles on her journey. Has the balls to treat its characters like adults with a still-healthy interest in an active sex life (which is on full display here). Funny at times, painful to watch at some instances, largely because we come to care so much about Gloria, who’s played to perfection by García. Ends on an unapologetically crowd-pleasing note.
2013-Chile-Spain-Germany. 109 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Luis Collar, Juan de Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín. Directed by Sebastián Lelio. Screenplay: Sebastián Lelio, Gonzalo Maza. Cast: Paulina García (Gloria Cumplido), Sergio Hernández (Rodolfo Fernández), Diego Fontecilla (Pedro), Fabiola Zamora, Hugo Moraga, Alejandro Goic.
Trivia: Remade in the U.S. as Gloria Bell (2019).
Berlin: Best Actress (García).
Last word: “It became this long process of interviewing friends of my mother, and my mother, and her mother, and other mothers and then discovering the single adults parties in Santiago. That was a completely unknown planet! Eventually, the world of the film started to evolve. It’s based on things that we heard and we realised we live in a world that is so insanely obsessed with youth.” (Lelio, SBS)
