Radu Muntean's fourth feature is yet another urban story about men and women in their thirties, just like his previous film
Boogie (2008). If
Boogie shows a world of discouraged men, regardless whether they're plain losers or married with children,
Tuesday, after Christmas starts off with a husband's adultery, which becomes the spark that reduces to ashes the illusion of the Perfect Family (a family with a spoiled child, with ski vacations in the Austrian Alps, living in a carefully renovated apartment etc). Although more dramatic through story and tone,
Tuesday, after Christmas keeps clean from the tragic. The husband and wife smother their marital crisis in silence and they perfect a certain set of separation manners. The relationship between the adulterous husband (Mimi Brănescu) and the dentist wife (Maria Popistaşu) boils at high temperatures and the private talks between them are especially exquisite. It's not the fire, the diseased passion found in Truffaut's
La femme d’a cote (The Woman Next Door) that changes their destinies, but an existential crisis with deep roots in the much too predictable comfort of their lives. There seems to be no room for surprise. But life - as it usually does - offers them a surprise. He falls in love with another woman and can't/won't live and act as if that didn't happen at all... Chosen for Cannes' official selection this year, in the „Un certain regard” section,
Tuesday, after Christmas is a sensitive and honest tale, very carefully written, with lots of fine touches and superb cinematography. It's a story that shows us a Radu Muntean even better placed within the intimate environment of film, plus it's a film which has a lot of things for the public to relate to.
