Tuesday, After Christmas (2010)

Beautiful, moving film.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Admirable film.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Those who like action in their films (as one reviewer well put it: guns, paedophiles, crazy driving, genius scientists, blacks and drugs, stock exchange, apocalypse, Bruce Willis saving the world, Asian crime gangs, etc --things that have no place in Romanian society)- will not like this film. I confess I found it a little boring until the final emotional scene where the actress playing the wife gives an astonishing portrayal of grief, which I will never forget. Utterly convincing. The rest is a deliberately mundane account of adultery between two very uninteresting, i.e. normal, people, who obviously enjoy, whether they know this or not, the thrill and the deception -- playing their pre-ordained roles in the time-honoured way of us human beings. One can admire the artistry with which the mundane is conscientiously portrayed but asking at the same time 'Do I need to see this? I prefer Bruce Willis'. The saving grace, for me, was, as I have said, the betrayal scene and the subsequent reaction of the wife. The other two are really no more than ciphers. The husband is completely without charm,vigour or grace, whomever he is with and the mistress is just that, and no better for being a professional (dentist). So film buffs may rave, while I acknowledge the qualities of the film, but say that it is not really the sort of material which I like to spend 90 minutes of my timer with. Correction: true, but that actress added something to my life in the last 15 minutes of the film.

A Romanian man must choose between his wife and his lover. The pacing is very deliberate. Scenes are filmed in long takes and little happens in terms of plot or action. However, the leisurely approach allows the viewer to get to know the characters, who are all very real. The characters and situations are so real that one can empathize with their plight. The acting is excellent all around. Branescu is not able to shine in the unsympathetic role of the man in the love triangle. However, Oprisor as the wife and Popistasu as the lover both turn in wonderfully natural performances. Muntean is a talented writer-director, someone to keep an eye on.

I questioned whether I wanted to see yet another examination of a failed marriage, but I am glad I watched this. The thing that sets it apart is its total believability. There are no high voltage fireworks as in many movies such as a Bergman film, where the partners rip the flesh off of each other by rehashing all possible old wounds. Instead we get a drama that plays almost like a documentary.I confess that about half way through I was feeling that things were going a bit slow by concentrating on routine daily chores, like getting groceries, shopping for presents, taking the daughter to the dentist, and so forth. But this served to establish that the life of the couple Paul and Adriana had devolved into little more than daily routine. You could almost extrapolate what their lives would be until the end. And I think this is what Paul was seeing when the opportunity to change course presented itself by his striking up a relationship with the attractive Raluca. This is not to say that there are no dramatic scenes to be had later in the film, but those scenes are well motivated by what has gone before. The scene where Paul tells Adriana the truth is exceptionally well acted and is a bit painful to watch, since it is so honestly scripted. You may come away feeling that Paul has made a very bad, or even deplorable, decision, but you understand his motivations and realize he is not a monster. I think this movie captures the essence of thousands of similar stories that are being played out every day in real life.

Don't let yourself be scared away by the scarcity and banality of the plot written on the main page here. It's not the fault of the person who wrote it, you simply cannot add more. It sounds like a story which has been told in books and movies for hundred and thousand of times. So what's so special here? The dramatic tension that builds up and the truthfulness to ... well, to life (I know it sounds quite mundane)are quite special. Don't expect blows and strokes a la "Damage" or "La paura", you won't find them here.After Christmas, after the time of (profane) rituals, conventions and mystifying is gone, Paul, the leading male character, hopes to begin anew, to be more truthful to himself, although knowing this will cause a lot of sorrow to some of his beloved ones. There is nothing exterior that forces him to confess the truth, knowing that this confession will bring an irremediable change to his life. Somebody else could live on, performing the same rituals and conventions (of family life, of life as a married adult with a child), Paul can't. It's up to anyone to decide how much convention and steadiness one is willing to accept feeling the growing "burden of the heart".This is probably director Radu Muntean's most cohesive movie up to date. With his previous attempt to make a Romanian-middle-class-drama, "Boogie", I felt that there is something (small, indeed) missing, there was still something round-up. Not the case with this movie, nothing too much or too less, my grouchy self piped down. Great performances by the main actors, incredible tense scenes (the bed scene, at the dentist's, visit to Constanta, confession, Christmas Eve), naturalistic dialogue, etc. Like in other young Romanian director's movies (Puiu, Mungiu, Porumboiu), expect quite a lot of long takes, minimalist soundtrack, no hyperboles, no black and white painting. Just truthfulness.