Gloria

A giant white peacock fills the frame late in this superb Chilean comedy, startling the title character and aptly symbolizing the way director Sebastian Lelio has fanned her open as a personality. Gloria (Paulina Garcia) is a Santiago divorcee looking for love in the city’s swank nightspots but finding only sex (if that); she’s old enough to have a grandson, but she hasn’t yet given up on life or the idea that someone might share it with her. To her great satisfaction she finds Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez), who’s middle-aged and divorced like herself, but their good times are hampered by his family baggage and peevish, unpredictable behavior. Lelio is admirably even-handed in his treatment of Gloria; for all her joie de vivre, she can be impetuous and self-destructive, a victim of her own drunken, dance-floor bravado. This is a driven, indelible character—like the women Gena Rowlands played for John Cassavetes—and you fear her going over the edge not least because you suspect you’d follow her. In Spanish with subtitles.