Film “Gloria”: “Gloria” in the cinema: The music of liberation

When does a sound become music? The Italian director Margherita Vicario (born 1988) shows in her debut film “Gloria” that all boundaries are fluid. Whether a sound is perceived as noise or as music remains a question of rhythm. And the rhythm that pulses through “Gloria” so that the film seems to come to life appears highly musical in all its facets. A successful application of Nietzsche’s “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

The director herself is a well-known singer in Italy who effortlessly switches between all styles with her own songs and performs as a soloist as well as in a choir. She has now incorporated all of this into “Gloria” – a film title that can, however, be misleading, as two other films have been released under this title in recent years.

So who is being glorified here? The diversity of sounds that Thomas Mann once celebrated in his chapter “Fullness of Sound” in “Zauberberg” – using the newly invented gramophone. What Mann’s gramophone is, 100 years earlier in “Gloria” was a huge piano forte, with its new expressive possibilities. Everything here revolves around this unheard-of event, which brushes aside all routine, like a stubborn top humming and whirring away.

But the euphoria is immediately dampened again in view of this film debut, which was at least included in competition at this year’s Berlinale but did not receive the attention it deserved. That’s not his fault, but that of an infantile marketing label that was stuck on “Gloria” when the film was released: “Feelgood drama.” What is that supposed to be, a feel-good drama? Mere soft kitsch? No, “Gloria” doesn’t seem to do that at all. Others call it a “historical musical,” but that too is insufficient.

The Berliner Zeitung even saw “Gloria” at the Berlinale as a “feminist-reactionary cake” that would easily upset one’s stomach, and another paper postulated: “Real girl power looks different.” Apparently everyone knows exactly what miss them here – but hardly anyone gets involved in the special form of this film, which is constantly carried by a vibrant musical intensity in which a long-held lust for life is revealed.

With the first images of “Gloria” we glide on a gondola over the Venice lagoon (camera: Gianluca Rocco Palma). The location of the action, the College of St. Ignazio near Venice, is one of those ambitious orphanages of which there were numerous here in the 18th century. Venice was considered a music metropolis at the time, but the main players mostly remained invisible.

They were orphan girls, the famous “figlie di coro” (“choir girls”), who were trained in singing and playing string instruments behind monastery walls. They also composed in secret. As musicians, they later paid little and accompanied services – hidden invisibly behind curtains – or gave church concerts. She was also responsible for teaching music to the nobility of Venice. After all, Antonio Vivaldi, Venice’s most famous musician, was also the resident composer at such an “Ospedale della Pietà”.

The director sees the highly talented – yet constantly humiliated and regimented – young women as nothing but flowers “that were left to dry between the pages of the book of history.”

Now, 200 years later – Napoleon was soon to conquer Venice and destroy the traditional structures – “Gloria” dares to take a look behind the scenes. It is an end time, we know here about the French Revolution, whose ideals the Doge’s Republic wants to keep at bay by all means possible. That’s exactly why Venice had to be hit with all its might. From the outside, everything still seems as usual. But in secret, people grumble and whisper – and create their own counterworld. This also applies to the young musicians who gather in the basement of the institute around a carelessly left piano that a famous instrument maker had bequeathed to them.

On the one hand, their creative power is lying idle here – or worse, they have been brutally dispossessed of it by having their works anonymized or immediately attributed to the “masters”, such as the burnt out and cynical bandmaster Perlina (Paolo Rossi). On the other hand, musical sessions are already raging in the underground, the wild happenings of those who entertain themselves without an audience – and in doing so break all previous norms. That seems to me an extremely original perspective on an end time in which the music of what is to come pulsates in secret.

So we see Teresa (great: Galatéa Bellugi), maid in St. Ignazio, who is considered mute. But she is neither mute nor deaf, but instead transforms the clattering dishes in the kitchen into her orchestra. She was locked up because she had a child from a high-ranking official, which she didn’t want anyone to know.

Now Pope Pius VII has announced himself in St Ignazio, and on this occasion a concert by Kapellmeister Perlina is to be premiered. But nothing comes to mind – and this is the hour of the girls of St. Ignazio. Of course, with these female artists – director Margherita Vicario is not kidding herself – it is no different than with their male colleagues: without competition, without little intrigues and envy, things don’t work here either. But the unifying bond remains, the vital sound that connects them.

They have one goal: to fearlessly push the eventual concert for the Pope into a scandal and to transform the expected humble sacred singing into a pop song festival. Margherita Vicario composed the film music herself together with Davide Pavanello; it runs through this film, which is much more worth seeing and listening to than its listless critics thought, like a fabric that is extremely finely woven.

What do young musicians dream of when they want to break out of their walled-in existence? By Germaine de Staël, the icon of the early women’s movement in the 19th century who caused a sensation with her epistolary novel “Delphine”. Independent and free, they want to travel together through France and Switzerland to perform there. After Napoleon declared the monasteries of Venice dissolved in 1807, a new era began for them too.

»Gloria!«, Italien, Schweiz 2024. Director: Margherita Vicario; Buch: Margherita Vicario, Anita Rivaroli. Mit: Galatéa Bellugi, Carlotta Gamba, Veronica Lucchesi, Maria Vittoria Dallasta, Sara Mafodda, Paolo Rossi. 106 Min. Kinostart: 29. August.