The Do-Over

A divorcée returns to the dating pool in Gloria Bell.

- David Edelstein

AT AN EMOTIONAL LOW POINT in Gloria Bell, the title character (Julianne Moore) drives along listening to GilbertO’Sullivan’s tenderly fatalistic “Alone Again (Naturally)”—“In my hour of need / I truly am indeed / Alone again, naturally”—a state the Chilean director Sebastián Lelio evokes easily, like someone who knows it well. As he proved in the original Chilean Gloria (2013), the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman (2017), and the lesbian drama Disobedience (2017), Lelio has a knack for bonding with characters (lately female and transgender) who aren’t merely lonely but find themselves suddenly, scarily unattached from all they’ve known, with little to rely on but spunk and pop songs like the ’80s disco hit “Gloria”—in which Laura Branigan sings, “You don’t have to answer / Leave them hangin’ on the line, oh-oh-oh, calling Gloriaaaa.”

It was a transcendent moment when Paulina García, as the 58-year-old divorced heroine of Lelio’s original, danced wildly to “Gloria” after finding and losing but continuing to search for sexual fulfillment, leaping back into the maelstrom. Lelio said in interviews that the film’s emotional heart isn’t “Gloria” but the great bossa-nova song “The Waters of March,” best known in English in Susannah McCorkle’s exquisite cover. He aimed to conjure that first tingle of spring amid the harshness of winter, the embrace of the promise of renewal. The film was a wonderful surprise.