Once again, the story is bookended with Gloria on the dance floor, enmeshed in a neon glow. At the same time, he wisely stays close to the material, adapting the screenplay he co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza into a fresh platform for Moore to give some of her best work in recent memory.
Unlike Gus Van Sant’s bizarre “Psycho” remix, Lelio boils the essence of his project down to a handful of new faces. However, Moore does away with those misgivings from the very first shot, turning “Gloria Bell” into the cinematic equivalent of a new theatrical staging for a beloved play. Some may question the reasoning behind the project, which threatens to bury the impact of Garcia’s original performance and implies that most English-language audiences would never take a chance on the original.
Julianne Moore hasn’t missed out on playing substantial characters, but Lelio’s English-language remake “ Gloria Bell” places her at the center of a fascinating cinematic experiment, as the movie delivers such a faithful shot-for-shot version of the original it’s almost as though Moore has been copied and pasted into every scene. It should come as no surprise that one of them was not only eager to work with Lelio on a future project, but to play Gloria herself. Much of the acclaim surrounding the Spanish-language movie noted the absence of similarly complex, authentic roles for a middle-aged actresses in American cinema. In Sebastian Lelio’s 2013 drama “Gloria,” Chilean actress Paulina Garcia played a 58-year-old divorcee who mostly enjoys her life, blending nightclub outings with a stable job and cozy family time, until a misguided romance disrupts that careful balance.