A Likeness

Looking for love can be a dispiriting at the best of times, let alone if you're a 58-year-old divorcée who only wants to meet a man on the dancefloor. Sebastián Lelio's Gloria presents an affectionate, tragicomic portrait of a titular heroine, Gloria. Since debuting at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival – ­where its lead, Paulina García, won the Silver Bear for Best Actress – Gloria has charmed audiences far and wide, proving a break-out for both its director, Lelio (previously best known, if at all, for 2006's La Sagrada Familia), and its 53-year-old lead.

In Santiago, García is a well known writer, director and actor for the theatre, and Lelio and Gonzalo Maza –­ the film's co-writer and producer – came up with the basic premise for the film as an excuse to work with her. “When they first contacted me, they hadn't even had a line written yet,” recounts García. “They had this role that they wanted to write for me, so they invited me to collaborate on this character from the very beginning.”

Though García was intimately involved in the creation of Gloria's Gloria, she warns against conflating actor with character. “These weren't my stories, these were the stories of Gonzalo and Sebastián's mothers, of their mothers' friends, and their friends' mothers. They wanted to talk about these women who are never talked about in films, to put the camera over [their] shoulder, and look in on their lives. They would ask me how I felt about what we were showing, but I wanted to never make it about me.”

The role finds García's character getting drunk, smoking pot, and eventually settling on a former naval officer as a potential beau, charged with the desperation of someone who “thinks that love will fill that void, that emptiness she feels”. The complexity of the role was something the writers wanted at Gloria's core. “You can't always just have the sugar; you have to have other tastes, some salt, some vinegar. It's like life: sometimes it feels like you're having the greatest time in your life, but there are many other times in which you're having a bad time.”

It was, as an actor, a treat to play: “I enjoy suffering for a role, and having fun with it, [and] this time I definitely go to do both.” Even if García sometimes struggled to capture the lightness, and innocence, with which Gloria throws herself into her new life. “In my life, I think I keep in darkness, I hide a little bit, I stay in the shadows. I'm not sure I could dance all the time, go out to parties and drink that much. I'm more reclusive, and studious: I'm always working on things, and that can be quite [solitary]. Being an actor is a public life, but I really live quite privately. But Gloria is out there, she has time on her hands, she is, more than anything else, available. She's been living her life as a supporting character... and now it's her time to come to the fore, to play a leading role.”