About halfway through Tuesday After Christmas, I started thinking about divorce cinema, as a genre, and plotting out its contours in the pages of my notebook. (I am hardly the first to do so. There is a small but solid body of academic writing on divorce in the movies, with one foot in feminist film theory and another in legal scholarship focused on divorce reform legislation.) It is a difficult genre to quantify. From The War of the Roses to Kramer vs Kramer, Divorce Italian Style—sort of—to Scenes from a Marriage, divorce films are a diverse and diffuse breed. In cinema as in life, it seems, marital breakdown is all-too common.
The break-up at the centre of Tuesday After Christmas is among the most objectively, almost dispassionately observed that one is likely to encounter anywhere. Unfolding in painful real-time over the course of a single take, it is reminiscent of, yet entirely different from, Le Mépris‘s famous conjugal meltdown in Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot’s apartment. While there eventually does erupt a half-hearted burst of violence between Mimi Brănescu, as the cheating husband, and Mirela Oprişo, as the only-just-now-beginning-to-
You couldn’t find a more hollow man than Mimi Brănescu’s Paul, who lives a presumably happy double-life shuttling back and forth between his wife and his mistress, and who is only forced to choose between the two after they accidentally but inevitably meet one another. Note that I do say “presumably happy.” In fact, there is little in Brănescu’s performance to suggest anything other than middle-class boredom. What is perhaps most concerning, and telling, is that little about his demeanour changes even after he’s made his decision and, supposedly, chosen happiness.
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It almost goes without saying that Tuesday After Christmas is about as much of a Christmas film as Die Hard is, which is another way of saying that it isn’t really one at all. Holiday fare has never shied away from being dour, of course, but this film is especially so. Which is not to say that it’s quite as dour as some other films in the annals of annulment. It actually ends on a note of hope. Watching the film’s final sequence is like watching fire ephemerals emerge from patches of scorched earth after a bushfire. The seemingly instinctual interactions between Paul and Mirela Oprişo’s Adriana as they prepare and hide their daughter’s presents suggests the birth of something new between them, born out of trace elements deep in the seed bed. Their relationship may no longer be romantic and will certainly never be the same again. But it isn’t necessarily less valid for having become something other than a marriage.
MIFF Extended Program Note, July 2011
