dvd of the week
As Gloria in Gloria, Paulina García has such a gravitational effect on your eyes, ears and empathy that it’s nearly impossible not to be enrapt with her, as an actress and as a middle-aged Chilean divorcée coping with both loneliness and with falling in love again. Unfortunately, Gloria was not nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year and did not receive the subsequent publicity and didn’t last long in theaters. But the DVD is your chance to see García. She is the prime reason I think most people have fallen in love with the film, but she also is working with a director and a screenplay that makes the film more than a character study. It is, yes, about the modern family and about aging and the life course, but it is, much more subtly, about historical memory and the long-lasting trauma and recriminations of totalitarianism. While it is specifically about Chile and Chileans, all of these issues are universal.
