Tuesday, After Christmas (Tuesday, June 7, 2011) (40)

Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas opens with a man and a woman in bed talking after sex. They chat about mundane stuff like the length of his toes and the towns where they're from for about 10 minutes and it is all shown in one-take. This, of course, is a typical scene from the so-called Romanian New Wave. There is very little cutting and a minimal amount of camera movements or changes of focus; there is no score, there are no special effects, almost everything is shot in interiors with unchanging lighting.

Unlike previous RomWave films (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; 12:08 East of Bucharest; The Death of Mr Lasarescu) the world of this film it totally contemporary and filled with the same new and expensive stuff that we would see in North America or Western Europe - elegant cars, Apple laptops, iPhones, clean dentist offices. This world looks much more like Paris than the Bucharest of Police, Adjective (I don't know if this is a thematic decision saying that contemporary Romania is not what you've seen in recent movies. I don't know enough about contemporary Romania or how accurate those other films are.)

Unlike those other films, however, this one doesn't really have much of a plot. Paul (Mimi Branescu), the man in the opening scene, is a married father in his late-30s who is having an affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu), the woman in that scene. She's actually his daughter's dentist, and is more than a decade younger than he is. She enjoys the time the two of them spend together and never asks him to leave his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) to date her officially. Paul has other ideas, and decides to spring the news of the affair on Adriana just before Christmas, making the holiday, which they spend with his parents, incredibly difficult.

What is really wonderful about this film is that it doesn't have any of the political/social commentary that you find in a lot of the RomWave films, this is just a slice of life drama, a story about regular people doing what people do. There is as much content in what we don't see onscreen as what we do see. The title refers to the day after the holiday when Raluca is supposed to return to Bucharest from her parents house out of town - the day when Paul and Raluca's life together will begin. But we never actually get to this day as the film ends on Christmas Eve. The suggestion is that we never ultimately know what happens on that day. Paul has rashly forced his will on his wife, daughter and mistress, without considering the effects it will cause.

One of the most emotionally searing scenes in RomWave for me was in 4 Months during the dinner party where we see Otilia sitting at a table with people talking nonsense while she is thinking about her friend, Gabita, getting an abortion from a monster of a doctor. The long, long take with a static camera and wide-angle lens makes us fidgety in our seats wanting to move on to the next break. In Tuesday, we get this discomfort at almost equal level during a sequence when Paul and Adriana take their daughter to Raluca for a dentist appointment. It's clear that Raluca is in terrible emotional pain, but can't show it, for fear of tipping Adriana to the relationship. Again here we see it with a static shot from across the exam room, nervous at the unblinking, voyeristic quality of the shot.

But I think Muntean actually goes a bit farther than his RomWave colleagues by using lenses in a magnificent way. The first part of the film is shot mostly in tight shots with normal or wide-angle lenses, giving a naturalistic quality to the action. There's actually a beautiful rack focus in the first scene that switches from Paul to Adriana and back as they talk. At the point Paul tells Adriana about his affair, there is a switch to longer lenses, making certain action in the foreground seem intimate and close and separating us (and the actors) from the out-of-focus background. This wonderfully mirrors the isolation they feel respectively and is a visual reminder that Paul changed his life and the lives of his loved ones (including Raluca) irreversibly.

There's a wonderful motif that runs through the film of gifts and gift giving. Considering it's Christmas, the adults are all excited to be buying gifts for the daughter (there's a funny sequence where Paul and Adriana have to buy themselves gifts that will be given to themselves by his parents). In many ways, Paul sees his confession to his wife as a gift to Raluca - but it's a gift she might not want. One could see the lush life of these Bucharesters and the lavish gifts they exchange (the daughter gets a snowboard from her parents) as a commentary on the way Romanians have embraced capitalism after years of communist misery, though I think the film works well without such political dialectics.

This is possibly the most small-scale, intimate and subtle RomWave film I've seen, but I think it ranks in the top tier of the class. The acting, particularly by Branescu and Popistasu is wonderful, and the direction by Muntean and script by Muntean, Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu is nuanced and elegant. It has a beautiful look overall and a very interesting storyline.

Stars: 3.5 of 4