Looking at the opening moments of Tuesday, After Christmas—on tap for a two-week run at Film Forum beginning May 25—it’s not wrong to think what we have before us is a love story. In a beautifully composed long take, two lovers—Paul (Mimi Branescu) and Raluca (Maria Popistasu)—playfully jostle one another in bed. The scene, lit beautifully by the late-afternoon sun, looks strangely familiar on the surface. But the longer the moment is held, the more time the viewer has to read and absorb the intricacies of the relationship on screen. Everything is not what it seems: Paul wears the cracked mask of self-confidence, always on the verge of revealing itself; Raluca believes too strongly in the role she’s performing. When conversation casually turns to Paul’s wife and daughter, the tone takes one of its many shifts. This is a story of adultery rather than love, and the unwinding of the intervening marriage.
It’s a staggering scene, which sets the prevailing mood for the film at hand. Director Radu Muntean is a major figure in the oft-celebrated Romanian New Wave, a burgeoning group of filmmakers who represent less a consistent movement than a smattering of exceptional talent who geographically collide. What Muntean does share with his contemporaries is an acute sense of the subtleties and nuances in human interaction, achieving a realism that is understated rather than forced. A crucial scene deep into the film has Paul clandestinely ditching his family for a surprise drop-in on Raluca, who is visiting her mother for the holiday. She’s in the shower when Paul arrives, leaving he and the mother, who very clearly has objections toward his relationship with her daughter, to go through the painful motions of domestic manners. With only a few lines of dialogue, the two actors manage to convey a whole world of shifting emotions. It’s rare that a scene in which so little happens can be this emotionally charged.
Director Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas.
Part of what makes Tuesday so remarkable is its lack of judgment. It’s easy to take sides in a film of this nature, but the portrait presented here is more balanced. The wife isn’t driven to madness; the husband doesn’t fatally pay for his sins. The thriller aspect slapped on to similar material is also absent from Tuesday. The most dramatic moments in the film are achieved through the antithesis of standard convention, and the narrative is pushed forward by an unbelievable amount of tension and discomfort. When will the truth be revealed? How will it be revealed? Tuesday, After Christmas is undoubtedly a film of questions, but it makes no qualms about not supplying answers. It’s a tough conceit to swallow, but the film’s refusal of cheap morality is engrossing and, ultimately, invigorating.
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