"She might be making mistakes, but she’s alive": Sebastián Lelio on Gloria

The camera spies her from across a large room crowded with tipsy middle-aged minglers. The first thought is that she looks like Tootsie, with outsize owlish glasses emphasizing length of her face. But we quickly come to understand that Gloria (Paulina García) is a sophisticated, daring, sexy, mature woman. She’s 58, has two adult children she adores, an ex-husband she perhaps only tolerates. She sings along to power ballads on the car radio. She does yoga and laugh therapy. She loves to dance. She may be losing her sight, slowly. She meets a dubious ex-naval officer who recently changed his life, leaving his wife, though his daughters never stop calling. He’s struggling to inhabit a role that he can’t commit to, but look at the way he looks at Gloria. Can she really afford to turn him away?

Chilean director Sebastían Lelio’s fourth feature is a character study of uncommon brilliance, and García is captivating every moment she’s on-screen—which, come to think of it, is every moment of this film filled with telling ellipses, free of scoring, bubbling with incident, each one contributing to a deeper understanding of a woman of a certain age who refuses to stop changing, searching, dreaming, even if that means she might wind up alone one painful morning, on a Viña beach, with torn stockings. See this movie. It’s beautiful, smart, moving. Like its heroine, it follows its own path.

I spoke with Lelio earlier this week in Panama. He was there for an award ceremony. I was there for the film festival, where Gloria was screening.

Director Sebastián Lelio

JB: Your scripts don’t have any dialogue, so you depend on your actors to provide the words in every scene. But in this case you’re dealing with Paulina García, who besides being an incredible actress is also a writer. She must have had strong intuition about how to work those scenes. 

Sebastián Lelio: Yes, but that kind of intuition can be a problem just as easily as a solution. Sometimes that intuition makes you want to say something very meaningful, and that can be the enemy of the kind of dialogue I’m looking for, which isn’t meant to be informative or even literate. It’s emotional. It’s not text, but texture. Perhaps 70% of the dialogue in Gloria is irrelevant. They could say one thing or another. Dialogue isn’t the point.

JB: Some of the scenes that stuck with me most are those in which their significance isn’t obvious. I think especially of the scene at the party, with the father and daughter singing Jobim's “Waters of March,” and Gloria just listening with that curious gaze of hers. That’s the entire scene. I can’t say exactly what’s happening there, but it feels important. Some kind of quiet discovery is happening, though I don’t know that Gloria is even aware of it. 

SL: I would say that this scene is the soul of the film. Gloria is, for me, a bossa nova, a form which is sensual, but the lyrics can be very harsh. I wanted the film to be like that. You’re trapped by the storytelling and the character. Hopefully there is a sensuality in the textures and rhythms. Hopefully you’re sort of hypnotized and just really in the film. “The Waters of March” is about everyday things, a chair, a ray of light, a little piece of bread. That’s what the film deals with. It’s all about feelings.

JB: Did working with García help you discover things you didn't know about the character? Were you surprised what happened to Gloria in her hands? 

SL: I try to conceive of scripts as open devices. The problems are not solved in the script. That’s the territory of the shooting. I need to make the real discoveries during the shooting. So yes, Paulina and the whole process were always revealing to me not only the nature of the character but also what the film was really about. When you go to camera, you go half-blind. There is a point where words are useless. Someone has to trust that we’re going to get somewhere with this map we’re sharing. That’s where the mystery of cinema lies. I never understood Gloria. I was fascinated by her. And now I have to deal with this problem that women think I understand them. I don’t! I love them. I don’t understand them.

JB: You're a 40-year-old man, not a 58-year-old woman. But in exploring your desire to tell this story did you wind up seeing some reflection of yourself?

SL: That’s an interesting question. I guess my main connection with the character, or what I admire about her, is that she’s willing to live her life without fear of what price she has to pay for it. She might be making mistakes, but she’s alive. She manages to keep that way of being in the world. I would like to be like that. So I guess it’s like a message that you send to yourself in a very unconscious way. The other important message is, Relax, you will keep having sex for many, many years. [Laughs]

Guy down in front next to the lady, he's our man in Panama: a comic chronicle of heartache, humiliation and pathology in Key West, circa 1978

I have never been to Key West, Florida. At least not, you know, in the conventional sense. But I have written about it, several times in fact, and what’s more I even wrote about Key West for the people of Key West. My pal Paul moved down there and got me a gig with a local magazine, interviewing Key Westers or, in any case, people somehow associated with the place, however incredibly tangentially. I’d talk to them and then write about our conversation in such a way that made it seem like I personally had something profound to say about Key West, even pretending it was a place I could in some way call home. The ruse was encouraged by my superiors. It was weirdly fun.

Most of what I do know about Key West I learned the same highly dubious way I learn most things: from reading fiction. Key West’s literary history is of course formidable, with its Hemingways and Tennessees and Elizabeth Bishops, though the period that really got me interested occured after their time, a period that previous to this gig I knew absolutely zilch about. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about Key West seemed to talk about what the place was like in the 70s, the time before colossal gentrification, the time of locally sanctioned madness, cheap real estate, too many guns, too many drugs, rampant corruption and literary outlaws. And I don’t know that any one figure seemed to sum up that time better than Thomas McGuane, a.k.a. Captain Berserko. Dude was so crazy he even married Margot Kidder. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t live there anymore.

The McGuane novel that everyone considers to be the his defining Key West work is Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), which he himself eventually made into an amiably off the wall movie with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and Kidder (enough said). But the one that strikes me as the genuine article, the one that comes closest to mapping out the particular pathology of that era/place/generation is in fact the novel McGuane took his biggest critical whipping for, largely on account of its disquieting degree of autobiographical content delivered in the treacherous wake of McGuane’s time spent courting Hollywood and seducing starlets. Literary types tend to find it distasteful when ostensibly serious writers overstep the boundaries of literary celebrity, and Panama (78), dragged McGuane’s private hysteria and public fumbles out into the open. You ask me, it’s a hell of a book, that much better—not to mention funnier—than its predecessor for laying its heart so crudely bare—though like Ninety-two, the mercurial comic prose is in high gear.

Panama’s protagonist is one Chester Pomeroy, returning to Key West to lick his wounds following some sort of debacle, or a perhaps series of them. The back cover blub explains that Chester’s a washed-up rock star, though you’d never glean that from anything described in the meat of the novel. He mentions being on tour, seems to like music, and at one point recalls having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard, but the way he conveys his past vocational adventures tends to be willfully oblique and/or surreally embellished: “I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.”

Chester’s two central concerns upon his return, the poles of some Oedipal wish-fulfillment, are: a reunion with Catherine, a woman he apparently married years ago in Panama, though neither can remember the ceremony, a woman he publicly insulted at some point in his blurry past but whom he still loves with an aching force, so much so that he stalks her in super markets and actually nails his left hand to her door while super-loaded on Bolivian cocaine; and to continue denying that his father is still alive, wealthy and boring, rather than a store detective who died of smoke inhalation in a Boston subway fire years ago. This is just one example of our hero’s selective or severely damaged recall skills. Chester’s memory issues are offered some degree of remedy when Catherine hires a private detective to follow him around so as to report back later on his actions. Yet in Chester’s first-person narration there’s never anything less than a rich sense of someone less than obsessed with coming to terms with his own identity. In an especially memorable moment, that sense of self-actualization is specifically concerned with how his relationship to place: “I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death.”

In a certain sense Panama is a novel of redemption, though the shape or value of this redemption is hardly clearly defined or entirely resolved. It is a sort of staggering celebration of self-implosion and fiery bullshit, and a treatise on the limitations of willing oneself toward insanity. And it’s thick with a palpable, desperate heartache that refuses to surrender to the notion of a polite, quiet laying down of arms in romantic battle. What’s important too is that it speaks so specifically of a geography and a people as an entry point into persona and story. Whether or not the Key West of Panama really existed matters less than the fact that only Key West, that crazed, slightly suicidal Key West of the 70s, could have helped give birth to this heartfelt, daring, extraordinary goof of a novel.