by Chris Feil
For everywoman Gloria Bell, you are what you listen to. In this retelling, as it was with his Chilean original starring Paulina García, Sebastián Lelio places his eponymous hero in a headspace where music is all around. This time it is Julianne Moore who frequents dance clubs with bisexual lighting and sings in her car as if no one is watching. But the film succeeds through the audience’s musical voyeurism of watching such vulnerable moments, all of them stitched together into the broader canvas that is her life.
Lelio curates a batch of upbeat standards of adult contemporary radio, many of them overly familiar but here they provide specific texture...
As a collection of romantically tinged tunes of a certain era, it reflects Gloria’s search for love and sustained optimism through the process of aging. And with this bright soundtrack constantly playing, it also reminds us that such explorations need not be limited to the grimmer stuff of darker movies. Lelio’s musical sensibility is a soulful one, keeping the film a feel-good experience but also a grounded one.
Those car ride singalongs especially feel like we’re seeing something private. It’s the kind of moment we laugh at on impulse. We catch a glimpse of a fellow driver wailing to their radio, and it’s cringey because we’ve all done it and would crumble if caught in the act. We may chuckle at her display, but the film’s embrace doesn’t make our laughter at her expense. Like the uplifting sway of her music tastes, in these moments the film is also inviting us to take ourselves a little less seriously.
At the same time, this nakedness matches how falling in love leaves us exposed. The songs Gloria sings along to - Olivia Newton John’s “A Little More Love”, Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” - speak to that romantic vulnerability. If the whole movie is about letting go of feeling silly, or feeling insufficient, these are the scenes that tell us how fun that process can be. It’s later when Gloria stops singing along that she feels less herself, with Matthew Herbert’s score remaining beautifully attuned to the interiority of Moore’s emotions.
However, the most glorious of exorcism comes when she gets her musical comeuppance with her heartbreaker boyfriend, John Turturro’s Arnold. Lelio stages her paintball gun attack on him to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, simply one of the most genius song choices in recent years. The song is legendary for its high key drama, the peaks and valleys of its emotion - it’s the kind of song we all have sang with abandon in the non-privacy of our cars. The song crests as she takes action against Arnold, announcing her worth in the process.
She cathartically laughs it off, but what next? With her feelings laid so bare, it feels as if collapse or reclaiming her optimism could go either way. Here is where her signature song arrives, Laura Branigan’s “Gloria”, as if a seismic piece of self-actualization in name and sound. A musical direct lift from the original film, we watch her as she begins to dance again, choosing positivity before our eyes and in real time. Spinning, laughing into her future.
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