Masterpiece or just another Tuesday after Christmas?: TIFF 2010 – Day 08

A day after Aurora: Tuesday, after Christmas

Somehow, Aurora was a bit too strong, too ambiguous, and too dark to let you watch another film for the next 24 hours. When compared to it, Rdau Muntean’s fourth film, Tuesday, after Christmas, feels less intense and less challenging, even if there is word of mouth that it’s Muntean best film in years. It may be so: nothing about Tuesday, after Christmas feels useless, added for the hell of it; on the contrary, when the final scene fades, you have the feeling that it can’t be just that. Well, it is, and I guess Muntean bets precisely on this story, with the smallest number of scenes. There aren’t a lot more than ten scenes in this film that tells the story of Paul (Mimi Brănescu), his wife, Adriana (Mirela Oprişor) and Paul’s younger mistress, Raluca (Maria Popistaşu): two of them involve Paul and Raluca, six or seven of them are casual scenes from a marriage, with Paul and Adriana in a restaurant or going shopping or simply at home, ultimately, two of them, more tensed, represent the film’s highlights, either because the three characters happen to be in the same room or because Paul decides to confess his unfaithfulness to Adriana. This is how Tuesday, after Christmas looks like if you look at it and seriously try to analyze it. Of course, there’s more to it, as the film is much more fluid, with a carefully dosed analyze of the everyday events: if you care about details, you can notice how Paul is in love with Raluca from little details of his interactions with Adriana. Tuesday, after Christmas is not easy to comprehend, but all the small details to understand it are at hand. Still, as a viewer, I would like less episodic characters and a plot that would be a little more complex than that, not necessarily a Romanian version of Husbands and Wives, but something different that would tell a little bit more about the complexities of the situation. Instead, Tuesday, after Christmas looks a lot more like the story Paul would tell, once he’s been separated from his wife. Near the end, there is a scene involving Paul and a friend of his, Cristi (Dragoş Bucur), meeting into the apartment Paul moved shortly after confessing he’s in love with Raluca. We don’t see them talking at all about what happened in the last days, we don’t know, maybe they already had that talk, but if Paul would start to talk, his story would look like the twenty or thirty minutes near the end of the film. Tuesday, after Christmas looks a lot like eventually is that story, a minimal recording of the events that lead to the separation and, ultimately, it ends without a proper epilogue.

On the other hand, a film like Tuesday, after Christmas is nearly perfect for Mimi Brănescu and Mirela Oprişor, as actors, simply because Muntean, as a director, is interested primarily in the immediate emotions of his characters. In the first part of the film, we are witnessing mostly Paul, his silences, we see him thinking about something (we don’t know yet what that something is), but, by the time Adriana finds out about him and Raluca, it’s her turn to be followed around by the camera, as you would think Muntean is literally chasing the emotions of his cast. In the long scene of the confession, what we see mostly is how Adriana behaves, as the camera visibly follows her through the room. As the end of the film is not far from this scene, it is precisely this confrontation that haunts you, once you left the theater, and it’s a pity, because the script isn’t very fair with the character of the wife: she screams, kicks, becomes vulgar and compulsively repeats “why did I ruined my life with you?”. Where does it come from, this character, that argues in her lines that the life is over for her once she’s been left, from what era before feminism is she abducted and transported in this otherwise modern film? Because, after this outburst, it’s hard to recognize her; she looks more like a feminine character from the theatrical Romanian dramas of the 90s, an revolute character in a contemporary tragedy. It’s true that opposite films, like this year’s A Rational Solution, are equally hard to watch if you think that that utopian solution, of calmly talking, even though you’ve been badly hurt, doesn’t always work. But the overemphasizing of emotions in a film that worked until that moment on the basis of subtly defining its characters is disarming, as the sudden metamorphosis of Adriana into a hopeless, vulnerable character isn’t entirely believable and unbalances the film. The film, nevertheless, gives Mirelei Oprişor the occasion to prove us how that kind of character could be played, and she does it with class, but I don’t know if this is the kind of drama that Romanian audiences, searching for a film able to speak to them, would embrace, even though it has, until a certain point, all the qualities of mature, modern cinema: it reflects the present, has ordinary characters and is mate with extraordinary precision. Tuesday, after Christmas could have been the answer to all the critics that were blaming the recent Romanian film that it wasn’t able to speak to and for them, but his venture in overwhelming dramatization makes it incomplete. Maybe, as I said earlier, it’s all a matter of comparing it to the significantly different Aurora, but Muntean’s film is both defective when it comes to complexity of the situations and too theatrical when it comes to displaying emotions.

Tuesday, after Christmas, directed by Radu Muntean

A few occasionally connections: My Beautiful Dacia

The project My Beautiful Dacia came as logic consequence to a video essay made by the artist Ştefan Constantinescu back in 2003, Dacia 1300 – My Generation, and it’s a mix of documentary, fiction and oral history. Its fictional structure is, metaphorically, that of the “rise and fall” of an icon, in our case, a communist one. The various episodes of this unconventional history of the most common car in Romanian communism are connected as in fictional films like Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, more by association and less by chronological or logical elements; in the long run, My Beautiful Dacia is more about the people and stories connected with Dacia than about the car itself. Those interviewed for the film talk freely about various significations of the mass-produced object in communism, but the best stories are about something entirely different, like the episode about Ceauşescu trying to escape in December 1989 using a black Dacia and eventually getting caught and executed. Even though a few of the conversations in the film are obviously far from being spontaneous, in the scenes where the characters try to remember their experiences, the films feels more loose. On the other hand, it’s clear that for the two directors of the film, Ştefan Constantinescu and Julio Soto, of big importance is the charm and colorfulness of a world that’s on the verge of extinction, and in quite a few situations the directors let their characters to address almost any problem, without interfering. Symbolically, the final shot, that of a Dacia crushed in the car yard, tells a lot about the eventual disappearance of a car, of an era based on the (at least theoretical) assumption of egalitarianism and, maybe, of disappearance of the stories associated with that era, stories that, for the sake of the nostalgia, the two directors tried to put on film.

The poster of the film Tuesday, after Christmas