RADU MUNTEAN, “TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS”

By Damon Smith

Too often in the movies, affairs are either blithely romanticized in the grand European tradition of middlebrow “passion” films (The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes to mind) or used as a teaching tool to bludgeon audiences into accepting a damning moral perspective on the consequences of extramarital activity. (See Little Children, for instance.) Life has its own current, though, and the nature of relationships sometimes follows a pattern that is chaotic and irrational, messy and perturbing, where the boundaries between love and naked contempt (ah, Godard!) are no longer discernible. Movies from Voyage to Italy all the way down to Maren Ade’s Everyone Else have portrayed intra-relationship dynamics with emotional honesty and astute insight, leaving us with memorable impressions of love in a state of deterioration, or foundering on the shoals of time. In his fourth feature film, Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean (Boogie, The Paper Will Be Blue) again fastens his attention on the question of intimacy and loneliness, crafting a frank, tightly constructed three-character drama that speaks volumes about marriage, desire, and how we negotiate the varieties of attachment we have to other people.

Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty, elfin Raluca (Maria Popistasu), who laugh and frolic in bed, teasing each other with an ease and gentleness that underscores their closeness. Minutes pass before we understand that Paul is married, and Raluca, a twentysomething dentist, is his lover. At home, Paul is attentive and affectionate toward his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) and playfully paternal with his school-age daughter Mara (Sasa Paul-Szel), who is about to be fitted with braces. The couple make plans for the holidays; everything appears to be fine on the surface, though we know Paul is experiencing inner turmoil about his divided life that he increasingly finds hard to hide. As with so many Romanian filmmakers today, Muntean allows great swaths of his story to move forward in real time (one especially tense scene at Raluca’s office, captured in a single … Read the rest

2010 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | By Livia Bloom

“You know the kind of movie where people laugh and cry?” asked a filmmaker character in Kornél Mundruczó’s Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project (seeking American distribution). “I want you to cry.” “I am crying,” responded the would-be actor before him, his face frozen solid. The internalization of emotion, and the tiny, subtle ways it can creep into the features and postures of even the most stoic characters was explored in some of the best work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

At first glance, the protagonist of A Screaming Man (pictured above) (Un homme qui crie, seeking distribution), by the talented Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, looks less like a man screaming than a man lounging. Champion (played by Saleh Haroun) hangs out with his teenage son in the pool of the posh hotel where they work, feeds watermelon to his wife till juice drips from her chin, and knows all his neighbors by their nicknames. At night, he does sit-ups on a plastic mat outside his home until he can do no more; then a pause; then he begins again. When this former swimming ace loses the job that defines him, emotional hurt barely registers on his placid surface. Only gradually do his actions, set against the backdrop of his country’s political strife, begin to belie the startling ferocity of his true response and the disastrous ripples of its consequences.

Although not one female director was selected for the Official Cannes Competition this year, it was a great year for female performers. Several actresses did yeoman’s work, backwards and in heels. In Lee Chan-dong’s Poetry, which won this year’s prize for Best Screenplay and has happily been acquired by Kino International, Korean actress Yoon Jung-hee carried the weight of a 139-minute opus on her thin frame. As Mija, an aging working-class maid raising her grandson in a small town, her character is at once modest and tragic, eccentric and proud. She holds her responsibilities very quietly, even when they become nearly unbearable. In Mija, these qualities are communicated in the smallest of ways; they are there in … Read the rest