With her lively feature film debut “Gloria!”, director Margherita Vicario landed directly in the competition at the Berlinale in February. Reveling in music, the Italian tells the emancipation story of a group of young women set around the maid Teresa (Galatéa Bellugi) in the 1800s. They live in a music school for orphan girls near Venice, run by an authoritarian maestro.
Anticipating pop music
Teresa finds a piano in a storage room and quickly learns to play it. While everything in the house revolves around the upcoming visit of the newly elected Pope, to whom a concert is to be dedicated, she experiments with melodies with other young women. Here they anticipate the development of pop music by a few centuries, so to speak.
At times, the film develops the dynamics of a rousing, pop musical. This is hardly surprising given the background of director Vicario – she is also known in Italy as a pop singer. With the Italian-Swiss production, she wants to remember the many ignored and suppressed female composers in history.
Emotional excess and kitschy moments
When she releases a new record, the first question that comes up is what she thinks of women in music today, Vicario said during the Berlinale. That gave her the idea to focus on female composers who worked between the 16th and 20th centuries. The end of the 18th century in particular produced outstanding female musicians, but hardly anyone knows about them.
The young women in the film fight courageously against traditional gender roles, patriarchal structures and for life-affirming music. “Gloria!” casually exposes bigotry and the danger of fanatical Catholicism. In its emotional exuberance, however, the film has some sentimental and kitschy moments and is over the top overall.
