What's right and wrong with Gloria

Let's start off with what's right about the 2013 Chilean film Gloria: It was a pleasure to see a film about people who are 40+ who look and act like real people, not like movie stars and not like some 20-year-old screenwriter's idea of what people say to one another. It's also great to see a movie about a strong-willed, optimistic, relatively independent working woman of modest means who overcomes a difficult relationship and learns or realizes that she need not be dependent on a man to feel whole, complete, or happy. Those noble sentiments aside, and aside from the smart and brave presence of the lead actor, Paulina Garcia (she had to go through a number of full-body sex scenes with a not all that attractive co-star, as well as a scary bungee jump that as far as I could see did not use a stunt double), there's plenty wrong with this film as well. Most of all, it takes an f-ing hour for the plot to even begin! It's fine to establish a character, to let us see something of her home life, work life, social life, family life, but I was pretty much on the verge of checking out about 60 minutes in that nothing at all seemed to be happening; I'm all for experimental narrative style, but a story does need some kind of arc and a sense of beginning-middle-end. At last the plot begins when we see that her male companion, as I think she calls him, is a kind of a shit: he treats her badly, she refuses to take his calls, at least for a while, then they're back together again, and then things get even worse and she learns her lesson. Pretty simple. But one has to wonder (some spoilers here): Couldn't she tell that he was duping her all along? She's a smart woman and not overly dependent of clingy, and she couldn't tell that his claim to be a divorcee was shaky at best? Wasn't his refusal to introduce her to his daughters who are always calling him some kind of tipoff? And even then, he can be a shit to her, sure, but the movie, so realistic in some ways, goes a bit off the rails when he literally abandons her in an expensive hotel room leaving her to foot the bill - for no apparent reason other than that he realizes he can't continue to deceive her about his family. He's either a terribly disturbed even psychopathic guy - which he doesn't seem to be - or he's made into a monster for the convenience of the plot design. Finally, and this is emblematic: In any movie that opens with a plain-looking woman wearing glasses, the woman will eventually ditch the lenses and look great. I was really pleased that Gloria continued to wear her dopey glasses throughout the entire movie, that she didn't have to lose them to win the guy - until, in the final scene, dancing at a wedding, suddenly she loses them. Damn, what a disappointment, what a cave-in to movie convention. Couldn't the movie be as bold and brave and independent as Gloria? (There are at least 3 good rock songs called Gloria, I'm not sure why, and one of them is used over the closing credits - as well as throughout the trailer that I saw months ago and gives a completely wrong picture of the movie, no surprise.)