"I am not a 58-year-old woman," Sebastian Lelio says from his home in Santiago, Chile. "I am not a transgender woman. I'm not an Orthodox Jewish lesbian living the in the north of London. But I have used cinema as a tool to connect precisely with what I'm not, probably to find new spaces within myself but hopefully to offer the spectator the possibility to find those spaces within themselves as well."
Oscar-winner Julianne Moore portrays the title character in Lelio's latest movie Gloria Bell. Lelio won his own Foreign Language Academy Award for co-writing and directing 2017 's A Fantastic Woman, which starred transgender actress-singer Daniela Vega. Last year he directed Disobedience, in which Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams experienced a forbidden relationship in north London's Orthodox community.
In all three movies, the characters are misfits.
"I just love [those kinds] of characters because they all in their own unique kind of way have this attitude that they are willing to pay the price to become who they are," Lelio says. " If that means confronting external forces of inner forces that are somehow in the way of that process or allowing that process to become unleashed, they will do it.
"When they have to give that battle, the pressure that [is] exposed allows us the spectators to understand what they are really made of. And I love [those kinds] of dynamics in a character. You lead them to a point where you are like squeezing a fruit. You see what's really inside, what's substantial to them."
In Gloria Bell, Moore plays a divorced insurance adjuster trying to navigate an awkward dating scene for middle aged people in Los Angeles. Both of her children are starting their own lives, with her yoga instructor daughter marrying a nomadic Swede.
If Lelio's new story sounds uniquely American, it isn't.
Gloria Bell is a remake of Lelio's 2013 Chilean hit Gloria, which starred Paulina Garcia from the Netflix series Narcos. Garcia won Best Actress at the Berlinale, so it's easy to imagine Lelio reworking the story extensively to make the film work for American audiences.
Gloria features candid discussions of current Chilean politics and shots of picketers marching through the streets of Santiago. "That's a good example of the things that we had to hopefully find an accurate translation to reality taking place in current day in the States. What would they be talking about? We had to explore that and try different ideas until we decided that those specific subjects were at the same time resonating with the story and were true to what is in the air in the public discussion in America today," Lelio says.
That said, Gloria Bell and her Chilean counterpart are practically twins. For the most part, the dialogue (including a unique explanation for the origin of cats) is faithfully and effortlessly translated from Spanish, and Lelio even duplicates the shots and the editing.
Curiously, the repetition hasn't hurt the current movie. Gloria Bell currently has a 96 percent approval rating on RottenTomatoes.com.
"At the beginning of the process of adapting to Julianne, Los Angeles, etc., I was tempted with the idea of changing some major things that made the first story what it was. Then I realized that it didn't make any sense," Lelio says.
"The attitude wasn't too different from the one you have when you stage a theater play again with a new set of actors in a different country, in a different era. It wasn't about reinventing the story; it was about adapting and trying to get the cultural nuances right, and then it was all about the performances and what the new actors and Julianne were going to bring to the character."
He's quick to credit Moore with making the original tale worth repeating. He says, "She's an artist who is in the complete control of her resources. It was such a luxury to see her incarnating Gloria. At the same time, she's an American woman who has spent her life there. It's a different type of existence. I think the camera is able to grasp that and to make it part of the [subtlety] of the portrait."
Perhaps Gloria has morphed seamlessly into Gloria Bell because Lelio usually doesn't make movies that reflect his own experiences. He's fond of critic Roger Ebert's definition of cinema as "a machine that creates empathy." Perhaps that's why he's been able to leap across continents and gender with his stories.
"I love that quote. I think that modern cinema is that you cannot make a film without defining a position or attitude toward what you are going to do with the empathy machinery that film is because you can create characters that don't generate empathy or you can create characters who are extremely empathetic or create a big amount of empathy," Lelio explains. "You might sit down as a man to see a movie about a 58-year-old woman, and you say, 'We might connect.' And then hopefully toward the film, you're really on her side, and you have discovered new dimensions of your possibility of being empathetic with the one that's different, which is what connects with all the films (I directed) that you mentioned."
If Moore landed a plum role by teaming with Lelio, other actresses haven't been so lucky lately. Glenn Close, for example, had to wait nearly a decade to star in The Wife because backers were leery of a having a female lead. Perhaps they were afraid of the opposition that Brie Larson encountered by playing superhero Captain Marvel.
In both cases, the resistance seems, well, stupid as well as sexist.
Close received an Oscar nomination, and Larson is currently ruling the box office.
Curiously, all four Lelio's most recent movies have had female leads. Asked if his choices for a protagonist were unusual in Chile, he responds, "Yeah. It's rare. It's rare. I think it's similar. I think it has to do with Western culture in general. Probably the appearance of more female-led films has to do with something that is happening with all of us. We can call it the feminist revolution or the realization that there is something to be observed and understood and celebrated and examined about femininity. But it's rare here as well."
MovieStyle on 03/22/2019