Tag: Chilean

Gloria Bell

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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:

Chameleon (Camaleón)

Posted on by victorfraga

In recent months through the critical and audience reception of Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, the home invasion sub-genre has received some untoward criticism. Underlining the discrepancy between these two viewers, it was chiefly in the film’s tension building that leads to audience walkouts and negative feedback, the former which captivated critics. It’s a genre which deserves time and the pleasures of the final moments are an accumulative effect of this slow burn. Working with this genre and to such a level of sadism is Jorge Riquelme Serrano’s Chameleon, Sitting a taut 80 minutes, whilst filmed in production during four days, its insular approach expands to comment upon an internal class conflict within contemporary Chile.

The final days of summer are typically filled with a sense of melancholy upon the impending darkness and decay that autumn and winter holds. The home of Paula (Paula Zúñiga) and Paulina (Paulina Urrutia) is similarly ajar with this tangible sadness. Wondering around cleaning glasses, Paulina’s morning tasks are rudely interrupted after throwing a final party at their idyllic coastal house, they are visited by Gaston (Gastón Salgado) who is returning two glasses accidentally taken from the party with their shared friend, Franco (Alejandro Goic). To the woman, Gaston appears friendly and pleasant. Still, Gaston and Franco have already been framed in an extremely tight close up before the opening title cards with Gaston clearly holding sexual and physical power over the aged Franco. Establishing a dubious stance on the character of Salgado, the film places the audience one step of the main character’s surrounding the true nature of his visit.

Filled with a decadent mise-en-scene, the summer house is the zenith of modern affluent wealth. Reflecting this weather, Paulina’s costume emphasises her conservative and advantaged status. An antithesis to her is Paula who clearly possesses wealth but not to the inherent nature of her female counterpart. Placed socially beneath them, Gaston’s complexion is not as privileged as the two women. In the interaction between the three over glasses of wine in the luscious sunshine, Serrano’s elicits a multiplicity of socio-political and psychological readings. Underpinning the sheer uncanny atmosphere omnipresence due to Gaston’s being there, the sub-text of Chameleon is its main driving force. In a particularly grotesque scene, the camera lingers somewhat too long, depleting its overall impact.

As they say, slow and steady wins the case with Serrano craving up a weighted narrative with a fine collection of themes and topics being discussed with every passing scene. Acting as another touchstone, The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2010) similarly erupts in its final moments into violence and narcissism.

Chameleon debuted in 2016 at the BFI London Film Festival. It was made available on Amazon Video on November 10th. It’s showing at the ICA London on January 28th, including a Q&A via Skype with the director. It’s out on DVD on February 5th.

Jesús

Posted on by victorfraga

This is Jesus like you’ve never seen before: he’s in an amateur k-pop band, he’s arrogant, he’s insecure, he’s violent, he’s bisexual and he has a very stormy relationship with his father. And unlike the Christian Messiah, he does not save and redeem people. Quite the opposite: he murders instead. Our protagonist here is the antithesis of the citizen any society would cherish and value.

Jesús (Nicolás Durán) is an 18-year-old “lazy bone” (as described by his friends) who leads an empty and hedonistic existence in Santiago of Chile: he dances, he takes drugs, he watches trashy television and he has sex in public places. He lives with his father, with whom he barely communicates except when he chastises his son for his behaviour and lifestyle. One day Jésus and three friends (one of which happens to be his occasional sex partner) brutally torture and kill a young gay man called Gonzalo in a park, in a morbid display of homophobia and feigned masculinity. The four men take enormous pleasure in their misdeed; it’s as if they discharged their sexuality through violence.

In reality, Fernando Guzzoni intended his film to centre around the father and son relationship, as a metaphor of his country’s turbulent political landscape. While he was writing his film script in 2012, the homophobic murder of Daniel Zamudio by four males – including a bisexual man and a Michael Jackson impersonator – shook his country, and so he decided to incorporate a murder under very similar circumstances in his movie. He replaced Daniel with Gonzalo, and the Michael Jackson impersonator with a k-pop dancer. And he retained the fact that at least one of the perpetrators of the homophobic crime had homosexual tendencies.

One of the most memorable and symbolic moments of the film is when Jésus cuts his hand with a knife, then proceeds to clean it and bathe in a local creek. Is it just his hands that are dirty, or is his whole body muddied with self-hatred? Can he wash his crime away? Can he cleanse himself of his homosexual tendencies?

The director did stumble across one problem when changing his movie script to include the homophobic crime. The infamous murder diluted the father-son relationship, which was originally intended to be the main story. The metaphor with the political landscape is pretty much absent, and the film instead became a social statement. Perhaps this was intentional.

Jesús is not easy and light watching. The violence is graphic and prolonged, serving as a painful reminder that homophobia is, quite literally, alive and kicking. This is not the only Chilean film to deal with the sadistic murder of Daniel ZamudioÇ last year the rock star Álex Anwandter directed You’ll Never Be Alone – click here for our review of the film. It’s remarkable that Chile is using cinema in order to atone for its homophobic transgressions.

The recent transphobic murder of transsexual woman Dandara in Brazil (which was filmed and published online) has caused indignation both in the Latin American country and the world. Let’s hope that the largest country in Latin America reacts to this barbarous crime in the same way as Chile: using cincme as a tool to remember and to denounce such gratuitous violence and the lives cut short.

Jesus is showing right now at the BFI Flare London LGBT Film festival, when this piece was originally written.

Watch Jesus online now, with DMovies and Eyelet: