Tuesday, After Christmas
Mimi Branescu, Maria Popistasu, Mirela Oprisor
Director: Radu Muntean
Of the filmmakers who emerged from the so-called Romanian New Wave in the previous decade, Radu Muntean is neither the first off the block (that's Cristi Puiu, whose short film Stuff and Dough is largely seen as marking Year Zero for his generation) nor the most acclaimed (Cristian Mungiu's three full-length films have all appeared at Cannes, with a Palme d'Or and a best screenplay prize to show for them).
Nevertheless, Muntean's contribution is significant. He's the first to situate a narrative with barely a hint about Romania's Ceausescu epoch: 2008's Boogie is set in the present day and revolves around the titular married man's reflections on his younger, reckless self - and his attempt to relive it.
While one could argue Muntean is using Boogie's nostalgia as a reference to the past, his latest film is a definitive break from the theme of revisiting bygone days. With its three protagonists all middle-class professionals navigating a world flushed with material comfort, Tuesday, After Christmas is a marital drama shorn of references to the socio-political dynamics at play in Romania today.
The only reference to the recent past is a cinephile's in-joke, in which Paul (Mimi Branescu) and his friend Cristi (Dragos Bucur, the lead actor in Boogie) discover a DVD of Corneliu Poromboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest in the home of the former's dental-nurse girlfriend, Raluca (Maria Popistasu).
But that is a red herring of sorts. This 2010 film actually defines the best of Romanian cinema today - that is, a complex, nuanced and scrupulous attempt at examining flawed humanity in settings where characters make moral choices in their lives.