(Gloria Montoya: sleek, open, damaged, as Angela in Jorge Navas's Blood and Rain.)
Jorge Navas’s Blood and Rain premiered in a parallel program at Venice last fall. (It also won the cinema and the city award at last year's Thessaloniki film festival.) It plays like a Colombian Collateral: set in the seamy in between spaces of Caracas, the movie tracks the intertwined fate of two solitary dreamers.
Jorge (Quique Mendoza) is a taxi driver mourning the death of his brother who was killed by local gangsters. Angela (Gloria Montoya) is a beautiful though damaged party girl out for cheap, disposal thrills of casual sex and partying. The two interact when Angela impulses extends to Jorge an act of help and intervention. The movie balances genre, dramatically set around the fateful meeting between Jorge and the men that killed his brother, against Angela’s deepening awakening.I caught the movie the other day as part of Chicago’s essential Latino Film Festival. The movie is about to have its widest American exposure by playing this week at the Tribeca Film festival.
In between screenings, the divine Gloria sat down for a quick interview.
Light Sensitive: This is your first film.
Gloria Montoya: I made some soap operas.
Light Sensitive: What attracted you to the material?
Gloria Montoya: I read the first version of the script. Jorge had a reading in his apartment, and the script was very different because this was like seven years ago. I loved that kind of character: she was a lonely human being, and in need of love. I liked that a lot. They made the process of casting, and finally I was chosen.
I also based the character of Angela on two important books. One was a Colombian writer and the other was an Argentina writer. I was very close to these books to build the psychology of Angela.
Light Sensitive: One of the most interesting moments occurs inside the underground club. You and the exotic dancer make eye contact, and the look that comes over you is quite revealing. It’s your point of emphasis or sympathy with her.
Gloria Montoya: The character loves to dance, and she loves to go out, and not to the conventional places. She goes to the underground places to look at people. She’s lonely. In the middle of the night, you encounter many different people. When you’re drunk or high, you’re happy all the time; you can kiss anybody you want because you love everyone. I really have some friends who are a little bit like Angela. I based my character on those friends.
Gloria Montoya: Of course. Angela has this kind of self-destructive streak. She’s always tempting the demons, everywhere. She walks in a certain way.
Light Sensitive: Did you view her odyssey in religious terms at all, in her search for redemption or atonement.
Gloria Montoya: Not a religious thing. It could be a kind of redemption, but not in a religious way. She has a very hard heart, and she carries it like a black mark. She’s a kind of film noir character: she’s a femme fatale, somebody with a dark past. She helped this man, the taxi driver and the hospital where the lady lost her boyfriend. At the brothel, she tries to help the woman who was [injured]. She’s trying to help herself in different ways, but not about religion.
Light Sensitive: What compelled you to become an actress?
Gloria Montoya: I became an actress because of my husband. He’s the one who plays the taxi driver. He’s a very well known actor in Colombia. When I met him, I was a journalist. I worked as an assistant director in commercials. He was telling me all the time you have to do something in front of the camera. You have to act. I told him, I’m not interested. I decided to try it. Then it kind of worked. I suddenly started getting calls about working in soap operas. I began to study really hard. Now it’s the main thing I want to do in my life.
Light Sensitive: How did that impact your interaction, working in such harsh, harrowing material?
Gloria Montoya: When we were in the casting process, the final stage, we both had very strong opinions about the characters. The director and the producers were a little worried how our relationship would impact the film. They asked how two characters who’ve been together for seven, eight years or more can convincingly suggest people who are meeting for the first time. As an exercise we decided to live separately during the shooting. We never saw any problems playing those characters.
Light Sensitive: The film has gotten a lot of exposure on the festival circuit. How has it changed your career?
Gloria Montoya: The production of films in Colombia is growing every day. We’re going to have more opportunities to work in movies. But in order to survive we have to work in soap operas, because that’s what gives us the money. It was very important for me to make this movie. For a beginning career, it’s an important film in Colombian cinematography: it innovates film language, it breaks some standards and I feel very proud to be part of the Colombia movie history, with this particular movie.
Light Sensitive: The different Latin American countries seem fairly nationalistic about their movies. They’re very concerned about accents, proper dialects, even the cultural and class distinctions that separate the different countries.
Gloria Montoya: I don’t know. I hope in the future we can make distribution inside Latin America. It’s important to see the films that our neighbors are doing. We don’t do that right now. I have this script from Venezuela because the director saw the film at a festival in London. He called me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have it.
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