Reel Critic: Tuesday After Christmas

This past Saturday the Hirschfield International Film Festival screened Tuesday, After Christmas, a Romanian movie that was not only selected for the Cannes and New York Film Festivals, but also received rave reviews from critics across the country. It has been touted as “deeply affecting, brilliantly performed” by Time Out, New York; “a further example of Romanian virtuosity” by the Village Voice; and “a remarkable, pitch- perfect work” by the Los Angeles Times. With this high praise and acclaim in mind, I sat down to watch the movie with high expectations. Unfortunately, they were never met. In fact, I found Tuesday, After Christmas disappointingly flat, with poor character development and a plot line too simple for the topics it explored.

Tuesday, After Christmas was released in 2010 and directed by the popular Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean. It follows a married, middle-aged businessman named Paulo, who falls in love with his daughter’s young dentist, Raluca. Paulo hopes that his feelings for Raluca will eventually wane and that his family life will return to normal, but after five months of secret meetings and intimate phone calls, he finds himself so hopelessly in love with Raluca that he cannot bear to keep their relationship secret.

He comes clean to his wife, Adriana, on Christmas eve, shattering forever their small family. Adriana demands that Paulo move out of the house, and he obliges, transferring his things into Raluca’s apartment just hours before Christmas dinner at his parents’ house. He and Adriana plan to wait until after Christmas to tell their daughter and Paulo’s parents about the break-up, but it is clear, in the final dinner scene, that their holiday cheer is only an act, put on to save those they love from the repercussions of adultery — at least for a little while.

Although the actors’ performances are wonderfully nuanced and raw, the movie suffers from poor character development. As director, Muntean is so devoted to portraying Paulo’s inner turmoil that he loses other important details. We never learn much about the evolution of Paulo’s relationship with Adriana, for example, and we know little about Adriana herself or how she feels about her marriage (a marriage that seems lacking in passion but certainly affectionate and close). Similarly, Raluca’s backstory is unclear, as is the backstory of her and Paulo’s romance. These details are important, and would humanize an otherwise flat film, and because we are never given a full enough portrait of any one character, we never feel particularly connected to Paulo’s struggle.

Adultery seems to have become somewhat commonplace in the storyline of the modern romance — or at least the frequency with which it is presented in entertainment would have us believe so. Muntean paints adultery as an every day sort of sin by highlighting the unimpressiveness of his characters and their lives. Paulo himself is not particularly handsome or successful. He lives in a small house, holds a steady, boring job and spends his evenings picking up groceries. Although the simplicity of his story is not necessarily a problem in itself, coupled with poorly developed characters, it makes for a long and monotonous 99-minutes. For a movie exploring a topic as rich with complexity, humanity and morality as adultery, Tuesday, After Christmas failed to move me.

Tuesday, After Christmas was sponsored by the Hirschfield International Film Series and Russian and East European studies program. For more information about the Hirschfield International Film Series, check out go/Hirschfield. Next week’s documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, explores the Atacama Desert as the convergence point for celestial glory, archaeological investigations, and buried memories of political violence.