ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

Sebastian Lelio

Gloria Bell: Dancing through Life

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Middle age is tough. When you are Gloria Bell, however, you handle it with verve and joy.

In Gloria Bell, the English remake of his 2013 film Gloria, director Sebastian Lelio casts the luminous Julianne Moore in the lead role. Gloria leads a happy life. She’s divorced but on good terms with her ex. She’s involved in the lives of her children and grandchild. She has an office job that she seems to enjoy and girlfriends to confide in and laugh with. She also loves to dance, spending her evenings at dance clubs.

It is at one of these clubs that she meets Arnold (John Turturro). They make eye contact on the dance floor and from there the romance begins. Arnold comes with lots of hurts and complications from his own recently ended marriage and these will play out in sad, yet frustrating ways throughout the movie. We are rooting for both of them and are never really sure whether their lives will come together in a happy way. Both Moore and Turturro give sensitive and true-to-life performances. Youth is a complicated time in life, but Gloria Bell shows that mid life is every bit as daunting. Between Arnold’s needy family and Moore’s sudden change in circumstances (terrible neighbour, daughter moving to Europe, friend losing her job, son unable to stay in his apartment), they find that they have unexpected challenges to cope with. Will their budding love offer strength for these changing situations?

Gloria’s life is also chronicled by her daily drives. Karaoke-style she belts out whatever song is playing on her playlist and the music is always a reflection of her current situation in life. The songs are all golden oldies and add an 80’s vibe to the movie. It was a bit heavy-handed linking the music to her status but Moore looks so convincing as she sings along off key, it’s hard not to find it charming.

Julianne Moore is truly magnificent in this role. Her acting is subtle and nuanced. In the worst of circumstances she keeps her character even keeled and moving forward. These are skills and coping mechanisms that you learn with age. When she needs to make a bold statement she nails it. When she is happy she radiates joy and delight. Other than fitting her with overlarge glasses (to age her?) Moore looks like a woman barely into her forties, rather than mid-to-late 50’s woman that she is portraying. Even with an amazing supporting cast, this movie belongs to her.

So, if you are a fan of Julianne Moore (or have lived through a few crises yourself) this is the movie to see.

Gloria Bell is in theatres now.

Disobedience – Community or Individual?

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Religious communities can be nurturing and fulfilling, providing people with spiritual meaning and a sense of belonging. But those same communities may also be stifling and destructive of individual freedom and self-esteem. Disobedience, set within an Orthodox Jewish community, is a tale of the search for love and freedom, but it carries the risk of losing one’s place in the world.

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a New York based photographer. When she gets word that her father has died, she returns to the London suburb where he was the prominent rabbi of the Jewish community. She is not warmly welcomed home. She fled the community and its strict lifestyle many years before. Even her family and closest friends keep her at arm’s length. She is now an outsider, even though this was home. Her father’s obituary says he had no children. Ronit has effectively been erased from the community. But she is determined to pay her respects to her father’s memory.

She is reunited with Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), her father’s younger protégé and heir apparent, with whom she spent time when they were young. She also reconnects with Esti (Rachel McAdams), who is now Dovid’s wife. The three were inseparable as young people but the years of separation make things a bit awkward—especially when her return kindles a romantic spark between Esti and Ronit. As the week of mourning progresses, the tensions of the community and within the three-person relationship grew to the point of breaking.

On one level, this film seems to speak to the repressive nature of religion. Certainly, that is what Ronit left behind her when she set out to live a different life and her return opens the possibility of another kind of life for Esti, who has suppressed her desires through the years. But the film also plays various tensions that exist in a more universal sense. Community and individual, desire and duty, morality and fulfillment, tradition and modernity. Many of these tensions are made evident in a pair of scenes: Esti and Dovid’s weekly time of having sex in contrast with the sensual explosion of Ronit and Esti’s encounter.

All three of these characters must struggle to come to grips with the changes represented by Ronit’s return to the community—even for a short time. Each must determine what there is of value that they can hold on to, and what they might have to give up to truly find happiness in which ever world they will live in.