From an executive’s perspective, Sebastián Lelio’s new film Gloria Bell is the platonic ideal of a remake. While not strictly a shot-for-shot remounting of the Chilean director’s 2013 film more simply titled Gloria, he sticks to the script, often literally. Same tale of a middle-aged woman finding her groove, then love, and then herself. Same needle-drop of Laura Branigan’s disco lifesaver Gloria to soundtrack our gal shaking it all off during an electric dance sequence. Same cathartic climax in a vengeful hail of paintballs.
This is path of least resistance film-making. In straying so minimally from the course he set for himself, Lelio has created a film that is not unpleasant (swapping in Julianne Moore for the lead role would improve pretty much every film ever made) but entirely free of risk. For the studio heads tasked with squeezing as much money out of the project as possible, it’s a can’t-fail proposition even safer than sanding off all of a foreign hit’s edges to prep it for Stateside viewers. If the original played like gangbusters on the global festival circuit, how could the same thing repackaged with the familiar face of a favored actress possibly not work?
It’s a solid recipe for success – though the box-office receipts will provide the final word on this strategy’s efficacy – but it robs the very concept of a remake of its purpose. When a director takes a second go at their own work, we get valuable insights both into their individual creative process and the difference between domestic and foreign film markets. Each self-made remake is in part an artist’s reassessment of themselves, a chance to do what they wish they could have or change what they dislike, and in part a concession to the industry. Balancing business imperatives with highly personal creative tinkering has resulted in some revealing oddities with a direct link to their authors’ psyche.
For cinephiles in the know, the aggressive similarity of Lelio’s films first bring to mind Michael Haneke’s notorious experiment with his 1997 film Funny Games. At the time of the US version’s release in 2007, his detractors questioned the utility of bringing his film back to life with zero alterations, save casting Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet in the main quartet of roles. In Haneke’s extenuating circumstance, however, the meta-textual acts of recasting and offering the film up to an American audience in specific constitute differences on their own. He conceived his original film as a broadside against the western fetish for violence and sadism flourishing most robustly in Hollywood, and by moving its American cousin onto a bigger platform (or so he thought; the now-defunct Warner Independent declined to give Haneke the wide release he sought) in closer proximity to its intended target, he underscored his point.
More common are the remakes that serve as updates, taking advantage of an increase in resources or technological capability. Michael Mann directed the low-rent thriller LA Takedown in 1989, then let his images and ideas ripen for six years before breaking them back out for his magnum opus Heat. The cat-and-mouse structure, the black leather glove and jet-black shades costume ensembles, the submachine guns fired from a tactical crouch – it was all in place, waiting for the budget required to do it properly. Same case for the first blockbuster maestro, Cecil B DeMille, whose 1956 Bible epic The Ten Commandments realized the same ambitions held by DeMille’s 1923 silent feature on a gargantuan scale unimaginable to himself or Tinseltown at large 30 years prior.
Alfred Hitchcock’s twinned films titled The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956) are less straightforward in their evolution, presenting an advance in technique and overall maturity rather than modernization to new industry standards. He overhauled the script from top the bottom, sharpening dialogue and pretzel-knotting the plot and adding the memorable “Que Sera, Sera” motif. The confidence he had earned with a few bonafide triumphs under his belt is still palpable in comparison. Even Hitch agreed, in conversation with the great Francois Truffaut, that “the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional”.
Everything mentioned thus far presupposes the director as the one pulling the strings, leaving only a final outcome in which the studio enlists the original talent while wresting control of the operation. Consider the sad case of George Sluizer, whose slow-burning thriller The Vanishing was a sensation in his native Netherlands. He reshaped the film for 20th Century Fox, making a number of compromises along the way. He swallowed the casting mandates, a script from gun-for-hire Todd Graff where the original had Sluizer’s own writing, and most egregious of all, a comforting happy ending in place of the previous film’s determined ambiguity.
Lelio isn’t trading in his integrity, declining to make a choice rather than making any choice in particular. As such, his latest film necessarily lacks whatever revelatory magic the original may have possessed, subsisting instead on the emotional power left over. It’s a cover version, but as Laura Branigan proved in covering Umberto Tozzi’s pop smash, a cover can still get you out on the floor.
Gloria Bell is out in the US now
