GLORIA BELL – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

There’s usually little reason for a foreign-language film to get an English-language remake (that English-speaking audiences have an aversion to reading subtitles isn’t a good reason). But writer-director Sebastián Lelio found a really great excuse: because Julianne Moore, goddess, wanted to star in an American do-over of his 2013 dramedy Gloria. And as is typically not the way of these things, Gloria Bell does not feel superfluous next to the original movie but a wonderful compliment to it, with an unexpected additional feminist note in how it underscores the universalities of women’s lives across cultures, or at least across postindustrial Western ones.

The action has moved from Santiago to Los Angeles — and Lelio and Gonzalo Maza’s script has taken on a new writer, Alice Johnson Boher, perhaps to Americanize things — but much is the same here for this new Gloria, a divorced, 50something woman with a mundane office job. She is a magnificently ordinary woman, the kind we barely see onscreen at any age, and even less so the older a woman gets. Women like Gloria are, at best, usually supporting characters in bigger cinematic stories… as she is in the lives of those around her. Continue reading…