Entirely filmed inside the Parque Dom Pedro Hotel in the centre of Sao Paulo, this 85-minute document follows the footsteps of the residents as they attempt to overcome addiction and to find a new purpose in life. The road to recovery, however, is never an easy one. There’s abundant loneliness, violence and despondency in every room of this high-rise building inhabited by broken souls.
This is an entirely fly-on-the-wall type of documentary. There is no voice-over and music score. We follow various residents as they interact with each other, as well as social assistants and pharmacists. They communicate with their loved ones on the telephone, often their only connection with the outside world. Some of the tenants are allowed to leave the building, yet the director opts to focus solely on the activity within this very unusual environment.
Let It Burn is dotted with fragments of fractious lives. In addition to addiction, the majority of these people likely suffer from a vast plethora of mental health issues. Benedita and Rita share a room and are deeply in love with each other. Benedita says that she was previously married and had “about 10 children”. We watch them lie in bed, cuddle and embrace each other with utmost affection. A violent man refuses to move into a smaller room so that so a family of six including four small children can move in. An unnamed tenant begs his beloved Mara on the telephone that she gives him another chance. A toothless man sings a Brazilian: “tell her you saw me crying”. It’s often through music and tears that these people find redemption.
Shockingly, we learn at the end of the movie that Sao Paulo’s new right wing mayor closed down the Parque Dom Pedro facilities just last year, with the residents left to fend for themselves on the streets of the 25-million-inhabitant and cruel metropolis. This is yet another tragic consequence of the reactionary cloud looming large over Brazil since the 2016 coup d’etat.
All in all, this is an audacious piece of filmmaking. It deserves credit for revealing the humanity inside one of the most vulnerable and marginalised sections of society, and also for filming in such a dangerous and volatile environment. On the other hand, I also believe that we film would have benefited from a little more contextualisation in the beginning. It would be useful to understand how and why the facilities were set up, what it achieved in terms of recovery, and the presumably dire consequences of the closing down.
Let It Burn is showing at the Sheffield Doc Fesr, which is takling place right now.
Pomm is a young and charismatic carer somewhere in Thailand. She works in a home inhabited by 14 Westerners with advanced Alzheimer’s. She has to provide her patients with full-on care, including menial tasks, hygiene, welfare and – perhaps most significantly – a lot of TLC. She talks, she sings, she hugs and she laughs with the extremely vulnerable and frail human beings in their twilight years. They hardly respond, and yet she carries on undaunted.
The fifth documentary by 40-year-old Belgian documentarist Kristof Bilsen is a tribute to kindness and solidarity, and also a painful register of the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s on the patients and their families. To boot, this doc also reflects on the economic divide between Europe and Asia. That’s quite a lot to pack in just 80 minutes, and the director does it very aptly.
Pomm is the epitome of selflessness and altruism. She tends to her patients with utmost passion and unflinching determination. Her employers, however fail to recognise her commitment. They hardly allow her time off to see her children and very own mother, who live a six-hour drive away. She feels guilty for not spending time and tending to her very own kin. Her father took his own life in very tragic circumstances years earlier. She bemoans her economic status, noting that Europeans are extremely privileged. Pomm is oppressed by a subtle version of 21st century imperialism.
Maya (pictured at the top) is just 57 years of age. She looks young and healthy and lives with her three beautiful daughters and doting husband in the idyllic Swiss countryside. But she suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s. She stands catatonic with a black stare on her face most of the time. Her communication skills barely exceed the monosyllabic “yes” and “no”. She doesn’t recognise her family. She has returned to very early babyhood. So her family makes the difficult and controversial decision to send her off to Thailand.
The director captures some intimate and also painful moments without being exploitative. This is an entirely observational documentary without a narrator. Pomm does most of the talk, sharing her feelings as a carer, mother and daughter. In what’s perhaps the movie’s most harrowing sequence, Maya’s husband tried to talk with his wife – who’s now in Thailand – through Skype, but she’s unable to understand that there’s a human being attempting to communicate with her though the computer monitor and speakers (despite Pomm’s and her boss’s repeated attempts to engage Maya with her spouse). Their helplessness is agonising to watch.
At the very end of the film we learn of a very tragic, unexpected and ironic passing away, which lends an entirely new dimension to Pomm’s predicament.
MOTHER just saw its world premiere at the Sheffield Doc Fest, which is taking place right now. A little trinket of documentary-making addressing mental health. Watch it if you can.
Devon-born PJ Harvey sits with her musicians in the basement of Somerset House in London (incidentally, the real Somerset happens to be in Devon). They record her 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project. The artist is relaxed and affable. She plays her guitar, while also experimenting with exotic instruments and her elastically distorted voice. She engages in friendly banter with her all-male team, joking about the vocal similarity between “You can’t” and “You cunt”. Onlookers watch them from behind a glass wall. Photojournalist Seamus Murphy captures the action of both sides.
Parallel to this, PJ Harvey travels to various dangerous parts of the world: Afghanistan, Kosovo, Washington DC, Syria and the border between Greece and North Macedonia. She interacts with the people and the places. In Kosovo, she treads on the ruins of a former family abode, noting that she’s wearing her “expensive leather sandals” (perhaps an ironic riff on the notion of the “white saviour”?). She mingles with a Lesbian Washington rapper who owns a pooch called money, hence the film title. She converses with a Tajik musician. And so on.
While entertaining enough for PJ Harvey fans such as myself, Murphy’s documentary is also too free-form and elliptical. The helmer does have a good eye for cinematography, capturing sad landscapes and energetic people. The narrative, however, is non-existent, and the outcome is a mere patchwork of recording sessions interspersed with war journalism. The background of the many people with whom PJ interacts is mostly secondary, and the focus remains on the magnetic musician. Some people might accuse Murphy of creating poverty porn, although I’m not convinced this is entirely fair.
The filmmaker devotes a lot of attention to Washington DC, which fulfils a double function. Firstly, the American capital is home to Black “ghettos” such as Anacostia, which are as violent as some of the war zones portrayed in this doc. The overwhelmingly white neighbourhood of Georgetown does not even have a metro “so that Blacks can’t reach it”, we are told. Secondly, and paradoxically to the first function, Washington is home to the White House, the biggest warmongering organisation in the world. A white American blimp monitors an Afghan city, reminding people of the constant threat of Imperialism. Or at least that’s how I interpreted it. Otherwise, I’m not entirely sure what political message the director is trying to convey. I’m not even convinced he’s attempting to communicate a political message at all. Watch A Dog Called Money for the music and the images, just don’t attempt to squeeze a lot of sense out of it (like I’ve just done).
A Dog Called Money showed at the Sheffield Doc Fest, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas on Friday, November 8th, and also on Mubi for a month.
From the opening wide angle shot of Alan (Bill Nighy) standing on an empty beach under an open umbrella we are treated to a film of visual delight, dry wit and bitter sweet pathos. Alan’s son Michael stormed out of the family home when he was 19, made furious by a game of scrabble, and hasn’t been seen since. Alan’s life is consumed by his search for Michael. He says he doesn’t want to die until he has solved the problem. He roams over the country looking for places where Michael might be and can’t go to bed without a walk beforehand in search of the missing man. His remaining son Peter (Sam Riley), now married to Sue (Alice Lowe) with a son, Jack (Louis Healy), has given up on his father yet tolerates him when he turns at his home and has to share Jack’s bunk bed because there is no other room in the house.
You might think that this is a film of intense tragedy with deep feelings and ardent longing taking over all the characters. On the contrary, I think only in this country, Britain, would such a film be made where tragedy is treated as an extended joke. Rather in the manner of Harold Pinter, the script is littered with dry, witty little non-sequiturs, strange obsessions and the loving survey of the most banal objects that make up the texture of daily life.
This film is driven by, of all things, scrabble. Scrabble was the cause of Michael storming out of his home, scrabble provides clues as to where Michael might be (by tell-tale behaviour on online scrabble sites), the fact that Alan has an extra “Z” for making the word “jazz”, which might provide a link to Michael. That Michael always played to the other person – not the board – could provide clues as to where Michael is on scrabble sites.
You might think that Alan is a tragic obsessive but not at all. This passion for scrabble gives him an intense of observation which leads to him labelling everything, an understanding of the small nuances of life and even to being a very considerate lover in bed – so says Margaret (Jenny Agutter), with whom he briefly links up. He notices that Jack (Louis Healy), with his sloppy old beanie hat, dishevelled jacket and uninteresting trousers, is cutting no ice with Rachel (Alice-Grace Gregoire), a girl at the local bus stop, whom he deeply fancies. So Alan, his grandad, a tailor by trade, whisks him off to his shop, gets him a nice suit (he advises him about doing up the buttons – the titular “sometimes always never” is the rule for a line of three jacket buttons from the top downwards) and cuts his hair. In no time at Rachel is all eyes for Jack and snuggles up to him at the bus stop.
The delight of this film is its concentration on small details. The eating up of meals on a tray, shots of people talking to one another, banal transistors and clocks, the dampness of the windows in buses, the emphasis on large spaces in the country, emphasising the great gap of Michael’s absence in Alan’s life. It is all very English and in that, very true. Life’s tragedies are not swelling choruses in operas. They are objects left in the corner when someone leaves forever (Michael’s guitar with his name labelled on the case), exasperated looks from family members, the silliness of storming out of the house over a game of scrabble, the ticking of clocks, wide open landscapes. The film captures the obsessiveness of grief, the need to keep re-connecting with the loved one, the going-over of details, the constant remembering of habits.
Yet this film is not sad at all. It is very amusing at times because people are funny and deserve compassion. Peter decides to resolve Alan’s constant searching. I won’t tell you how and I won’t tell you if Michael is ever found. The only other point that needs to be mentioned is the appearance of Alexei Sayle (Bill) in a short cameo performance, which is not particularly necessary but is entertaining in its way. Alexei Sayle is incapable of being boring.
This film will live in your mind for a long time. It is a jewel of British filmmaking and should not be missed. Sometimes Always Never is out in cinemas on Friday, June 14th. On VoD on Monday, October 14th.
Brazilian filmmaker Petra is roughly the same age as Brazilian democracy. She was born in 1983, just two years before the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for more than two decades came to an end. She thought that herself and Brazilian democracy would be standing strong in their thirties. this, that did not materialise. While the filmmaker is now an accomplished filmmaker, now on her fourth feature film, Brazilian democracy has collapsed, and the country is now on the verge of authoritarianism.
It’s very concerning that a democracy is far more vulnerable than a single human being. In the case of Brazil, however, it’s hardly surprising. The country’s history in punctuated by successive coup d’etats and periods of military rule. The elites have consistently found a to cling to power and maintain their privileges, in a country built upon a tradition of slavery and profound social divides. That’s why Brazilian democracy is frail and sickly.
In the first half of this two-hour money, we see the Brazil of Petra’s dreams materialise in the hands of the Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT), which won four consecutive presidential elections (two with Lula, in 2002 and 2006, and two with Dilma, in 2010 and 2014). We learn that Lula lifted 20 million people out of poverty and catapulted the Brazilian economy from the 13th to the 7th place in the world. Dilma continued his social policies, however she confronted the market by lowering the “perverse” interest rate. She was generally a less able politician than her predecessor, it is claimed. She was cold and lacked human skills. A member of parliament complains that “she never hugs anyone”.
In 2016, a parliamentary coup d’etat took place in Brazil, with Dilma being removed due to an accounting technicality, which the Brazilian constitution does not qualify as an impeachable offence. This is when Petra’s dream began to collapse. The director is connected to Dilma in more ways than one. Petra’s mother and Dilma were tortured in the same building a couple of years apart. Dilma was under torture for 22 consecutive days. She described her technique for enduring such pain: “I convinced myself that it was all going to be over in one minute or two, over and over again”. We then see a black and white photograph of Dilma on trial, snapped immediately after the torture (pictured below). Her tormentors cover their face, while Dilma sits up with a firm gaze exuding strength and confidence. This single image became representative of Brazilian staunch resistance.
Next we see coup-plotting president Michel Temer take office. Petra looks back images from Dilma’s first inauguration (in 2011) with Temer and Lula next to her (pictured at the top). Temer’s body language, with tense and fiddly hands, suggest that he was very uncomfortable in his position, and secretly mulling how to take over. We learn that Dilma never picked him to be her vice-president. PT’s coalition party PMDB chose him Lula explains the reason for such unorthodox alliance: “if Jesus came to Brazil, he would have to work with Judas”.
In 2018, democracy continues to collapse. The imprisonment of Lula – the runaway favourite to win the 2018 presidential elections – constituted the second part of the 2016 coup. He clarifies: “there’s no way that they [the elites] would work so hard to get rid of Dilma and let me win a few years later”. His high-speed trial was shambolic and Kafka-esque, without any evidence of wrongdoing, conducted by a judge called Sergio Moro. Lula’s UN lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC says that the problem with Brazilian justice is that the same person who investigates is the one who tries and sentences the defendant (a medieval practice long abolished in Europe).
Far-right member of parliament Bolsonaro consistently capitalises from the collapse of the democratic institutions. Voters filled with hate and anger of the Brazilian Workers’ Party turn to the authoritarian politician, who openly advocates dictatorship, torture and “banishing red” (ie making the leftwing illegal). With Lula being in prison, he proceeds to win the 2018 presidential elections. In the end of the movie, we learn that judge Sergio Moro became Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister (a horsetrading gesture in exchange for imprisoning his largest political opponent).
Petra’s short-lived dream became a nightmare in just three years. Democratic rule in Brazil was just an unusually long hiatus, with coups and authoritarianism being the norm. Interestingly, Petra is also connected to the reactionary forces that seized power in Brazil. She’s related to the Andrade Gutierrez family that helped to build the Alvorada presidential palace, and she’s a distant cousin of Aecio Neves, the defeated presidential candidate of 2014 presidential elections and and one of the masterminds behind the 2016 coup. To boot, some of her relatives voted for Bolsonaro, she confesses.
The young filmmakers is never afraid of taking sides. She understand that one’s personal history is intimately and irrevocably connected to their country’s history. The structure of the film – which blends archive footage, street images and a few interviews, and is entirely narrated by Petra herself – unabashedly celebrates the Workers’ Party, while also denouncing the dark and undemocratic forces that took over. Dilma and Lula are presented with a gentle music score. They are both candid and avuncular (contrary to the view that Dilma is callous and dry). The perfect uncle and the aunt for any loving person. The perfect mother and father for any democratic country.
The Edge of Democracy has just premiered at the Sheffield Doc Fest. It will be released on Netflix US on June 19th,with UK date still tbc. I commend Netflix for picking up such an incendiary and explosive documentary, that’s never afraid to make an unequivocal political statementas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it warns its subscribers: “this film is… provocative”. Thank God for that!
It’s remarkable that such powerful images remained unseen for half a century. Director, editor and producer Todd Douglas Miller was privileged with access to such material, and he did a very decent job cutting and assembling it. Apollo 11 consists almost exclusively from actual footage from the actual mission, bar a few very basic drawings of the the various spacecraft devices splitting, rotating and docking back onto one another.
The narrative is chronological straightforward. It all starts on July 16th 1968 at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Thousands of operators monitor the activity in minute detail from the enormous control rooms. More than 10,000 cars are parked outside, and avid onlookers are eager to witness history with their own eyes. There is also plenty of anxiety that the mission could be unsuccessful. Such fears are never voiced, yet can can be seen in the faces of the people present. Commander Neil Armstrong’s heart rate nears 150 bpm per second, suggesting that he too shared such feelings.
We then see Apollo 11 rotate the Earth, and a smaller spacecraft being detached and propelled into outer source, towards the Earth’s only satellite. They travel approximately 360,000 kilometres and reach the orbit of the moon nearly 76 hours later, on July 20th. They finally land on the moon, where they spend two hours and collected a few mementos. They lift off and successfully return to Earth, splashing down on a small recovery ship (resembling a UFO rather than the original rocket on which they left the planet) on the Atlantic on July 21th. They are hailed as heroes.
The sheer ambition and dimensions of the mission are still astounding. Never before had a man been to the moon. Let alone return safe and sound. The complexity of the successive acrobatics of the various spacecrafts inside each other (more of less like Russian dolls) are very hard to describe within a film review and even within a film (hence the useful drawings). Apollo 11 represents our insatiable curiosity to explore the unknown. It changed the way us humans perceive our relation to the universe.
The very first lunar landing mission was also a project of American vanity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed to putting an American on the moon before the end of the decade. President Nixon was proud and elated as he greeted the two astronauts Neil Armstrong and and Buzz Aldrin as they return to Earth, still on quarantine. American flags were emblazoned on all spacecrafts, uniforms and – as we all know – a large one was erected on the surface of the moon. Nixon talks about “a mission of peace”, when in reality this an expensive byproduct of the Cold War’s space race.
Despite the very questionable political motivations, Apollo 11 is undeniably a marvellous achievement. It’s quite moving to listen both Kennedy and Nixon deliver emotional and eloquent speeches about mankind overcoming barriers once deemed impossible. What a refreshing break from the far less eloquent and magnanimous current Potus, who just yesterday claimed that the moon “is part of Mars”. Such a clever specimen.
The mission registered in this 90-minute documentary is so extreme that it almost looks like fiction. Plus the fact that the landing took place 50 years ago adds yet another layer of distance and alienation to the experience. And that’s precisely what makes Apollo 11 a fascinating watch. Sometimes reality is so fantastic. Stranger than fiction. Maybe the moon landing was indeed staged by Stanley Kubrick.
Apollo 11 premiered at the Sheffield Doc Fest, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 28th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.
Narrated by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander and filmed in 20 countries across all six continents, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch documents the action that us human beings have on our planet. Such activity is so intense and profound that geologists have recently proposed that the latest epoch should be called Anthropocene, dating from the commencement of significant human impact.
Our planet is 4.5 billion years old, and our history is literally written in stone. Now this history is being quickly rewritten, as our planet changes at an unprecedented rate. We learn that there have been five great extinctions, and that we are now bang in the middle of the sixth one. Right now the extinction rate is 10,000 higher than before Anthropocene epoch began, presumably just a few thousand years ago (we’re never told exactly when it started).
The drone sequences capturing the vastness of our planet as well as also the profound wounds and scars that we’re leaving on it are the most impressive images of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. We see Carrara marble being dug in Italy, lithium in the Atacama desert, phosphate in Florida, and so on. The filmmakers also visit tusk collectors in Kenya and sculptors in China, heavy metal smelting facilities in the ultra-polluted and inhospitable Russian city of Norilks (320 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle), the largest man-made tunnel on Earth in Switzerland (we take a dizzying high-speed journey of the 57 kilometres), the largest excavator in Germany (at a whooping 12,000 tons), and much more. Structures erected by humans are changing, too. We see a magnificent Church being knocked down in Germany in order to make room for mining.
If you have the opportunity, watch this film at the cinema, so you can grasp the enormity of the Earth, its natural wonders and the damage that we’re inflicting on them. It’s fascinating to see the quiet and enduring stone formations on the surface of our planet gradually carved out and reshapen by human activity. The directors made the creative choice not to use any talking heads interviews, instead allowing us to marvel at the images. I wish, however, that the film provided the sources to their very bold claims (that doesn’t have to be done by the means of interviews, they could have used written notes, or Vikander’s voice-over instead). I also missed a call-to-action for us a individuals (we all know our planet is dying, but what is it that each one of us can do in order to revert this?). Still, definitely worth a viewing.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch has just premiered at the Sheffield Doc Fest.
Both a great primer on the man behind the look of the ‘70s and a dazzlingly enjoyable documentary in its own right, the Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, 2015) movie is perfect for both in-the-know fashion enthusiasts and those who know nothing about fashion at all.
Born Roy Halston Frowick, Halston’s designs and influence upon American fashion are undeniable. His fame started with his groundbreaking work as a milliner for Bergdorf Goodman (including that pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wore at her husband’s inauguration) to finally establishing his own company by the end of the decade. He ushered in the classic ‘70s look, with simple, uncluttered garments elegantly constructed from single pieces of fabric. At the same time, he was chummy with Andy Warhol, organising happenings that were the talk of New York cafe society, a regular at Studio 54, took American fashion to China, and presented American style to the French fashion world with a Liza Minelli-starring mini-musical at the palace of Versailles. Wherever the ‘70s was, he was there.
Everything was about branding. He always travelled with a group of impossibly beautiful models, known as the “Halstonnettes”. He changed the pronunciation of his moniker from “Halsten” to “Holston”. Even his worker’s had a uniform — strong, blocky, black costumes — so they wouldn’t detract from the clothes itself. Things that other people wouldn’t think of, Halston spent hours poring over, making sure that they were absolutely perfect, streamlined down to their essence. In many ways he predated the sleek designs of modern retail products, for example the iPhone, by elegantly displaying how less can be so much more.
This is a rise and fall story, however, Halston eventually showing the limits of his vision in the face of the rapid commerce of the 1980s. Like many businesses, the number one difficulty in maintaining a successful fashion empire is scalability. Moving from a small boutique store to working with the top retailers in female fashion is a gargantuan task, as affordability and mass production must be balanced with impeccable style. Halston demanded that every product had to go through him first; a conflict that comes to a narrative head while working for mass retailer JCPenney. Soon the control-freak artist finds himself being shut out of his own company to devastating results.
The documentary tackles his energetic and often larger-than-life story with a lot of style, creating a strong aesthetic to match Halston’s style. It’s metafictional techniques – such as the replay of archival footage on vintage TV screens, or the use of a “fictional” narrator who offers her own elaborations on Halston’s life – compliments the way Halston would present himself and his products on the world stage. While many of the traditional documentary techniques are here – including talking heads and old interviews – director Frédéric Tcheng finds a variety of ways to complicate the narrative, allowing the viewer to find their own personal connection to Halston’s work.
This approach seeps into the narrative too, only finally tackling his humble youth growing up in Des Moines, Iowa by the very end of the film. By starting with the legend first before revealing the man behind the curtain, Halston creates a smart treatise on how success is often predicated upon never showing your true self, and the true, tragic cost of acting in such a manner. Therefore it moves beyond the realm of the specific (Halston’s life) to the universal (success and artistry in general), posing the ultimate question to any young budding entrepreneur, be that in fashion or any other industry: how can you succeed without losing yourself at the same time?
Halston is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 7th.
When I saw the Chilean film Gloria (Sebastián Lelio, 2013) some years back, I was blown away. The story of a 50-something divorcée going out and finding herself sounded like the sort of movie I’d hate… and yet, against the odds, Lelio’s film, particularly its feisty central performance by Paulina Garcia, completely won me over. I recall it having a pretty decent Latin music soundtrack too, culminating in Umberto Tozzi’s triumphant disco anthem Gloria.
Leilo having in the interim carved himself out a respectable international movie career – an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman (2017), an impressive change of pace with the British drama Disobedience (2018) – he’s had the inevitable offer to remake some of his Chilean output for the US market. In Gloria Bell, adding the character’s surname to the title for the remake, he collaborates with sometime Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore.
So all the ingredients should be there to deliver something very special, whether you’ve seen the original and are going for the comparison or you are coming to the story for the first time here. And yet, somehow, the new film feels flat. It lacks the magnetic quality of the original.
Maybe it’s the difference between Chile, rarely seen on the screen here in the English-speaking world, and the US whose movies have flooded our cinemas. Maybe it’s the 80s’ US disco music on the soundtrack which replaces the original’s far more vibrant Latin selection. Certainly, it peps up at the end when the title song (this time the American version recorded by Laura Branigan) comes on, but it’s far too late by then.
Apart from shifting the story from Santiago to Los Angeles and the heroine from Chilean to American, the story is pretty much identical. So it’s hard to believe the problem is the script adaptation. This even applies to the trailers – the trailer for the original Gloria can be seen for comparison further down the page below the Gloria Bell trailer.
The plot has 50-something Gloria (Moore) go to discos in search of love and eventually embark on a relationship with divorced father Arnold (John Turturro). Cue unflattering, over-fifties sex scenes in which he has to remove a medical girdle he wears round his waste, all very commendable in terms of visual representation of that demographic.
Gloria has pretty much learned to let her grown up kids get on with their own separate lives while she gets on with hers. Her son Peter (Michael Cera) is dealing with an absent partner who has left home for a while to find herself and leave him to bring up their child. Her daughter Anne (Caren Pistorius) is on the verge of moving to Sweden to make a life with a surfer she met via the internet. By way of contrast, Arnold seems to be constantly under pressure from his two daughters who we never see but are constantly making demands of him over the phone.
After much resistance, Arnold is persuaded to come over for a meal and meet Gloria’s family – not only her kids but also her ex-husband. The evening proves too much for Arnold and marks the beginning of the end of his and Gloria’s relationship. Except that, try as she might to cut him off, Arnold doesn’t want it to let her go…
Julianne Moore is on the screen most of the time. Where the original film and Paulina Garcia’s seemingly effortless performance in it felt like a welcome breath of fresh air, however, if you’ve seen the original, this one feels like a pointless retread with Moore failing to add that certain something that Garcia brought. Which is a pity, because on paper this remake sounded like it might be really quite something.
Gloria Bell is out in the UK on Friday, June 7th. Watch the film trailer below:
And here, for comparison, is the trailer for the original 2013 Chilean film Gloria:
