All the lonely people, where do they all come from?" Lennon and McCartney posed the question, and "Gloria" provides an answer. Gloria, played by Paulina Garcia, is a 50-something divorcee whose children have grown up and moved out; she lives by herself in Santiago, Chile, with the occasional company of a hairless cat who visits to escape the raving madness of her upstairs neighbor. Gloria has a job, she's financially secure, her kids love her even if they don't visit much, she's healthy — hell, she'll even give yoga or bungee-jumping a go — but she's lonely, and all too aware of the years passing by.
She frequents a club for other singles of "a certain age" as they say, dancing to out-of-date pop tunes with the gray and sagging set, and not opposed to the idea of letting someone take her home. In her oversized glasses and dyed bob, she looks frumpy — indeed, the sight of all these oldsters getting their groove on will both embarrass and terrify many younger viewers — but, catch her in the right light, with the red gloss of her lipstick shining above a toothy grin, or the way she raises her eyebrows and purses her lips in quiet bemusement, and you can still sense something of the girlish that has resisted the weight of middle age.
Garcia won the best actress award at last year's Berlin Film Festival for this performance, and it's easy to see why. She takes a role that could have been a bit pathetic and turns it into something special, perfectly capturing the saddest part of aging: The body, the appearance, the expectations life places on you all change, but the spirit does not. "Gloria" is a bittersweet movie, showing us a character on the brink of desperate loneliness, but with enough optimism and resiliency to always bounce back.