Rent Tuesday, After Christmas (2010)

Tinsel, Teeth and Telling the Truth - Tuesday, After Christmas review by griggs

The bored middle-aged man has an affair subgenre has been mined to death, so it’s a pleasant surprise that Tuesday, After Christmas still finds a few nerves to hit. It skips big twists and leans into small, everyday details, letting the fallout creep up slowly rather than crash in with melodrama.

Radu Muntean takes the boilerplate setup – husband, younger lover, unsuspecting wife – and quietly complicates it by making the mistress the couple’s daughter’s orthodontist. It all unfolds in ordinary Bucharest spaces: banks, clinics, cramped flats, lit like real life and blessedly free of nudging music. The film lives in long, unbroken scenes where nothing happens on paper, but everything shifts in the pauses: a glance held too long in a consulting room, a Christmas shopping trip that suddenly feels like a hostage situation.

The late, near-real-time confession to the wife is excruciating, held so long you almost want to leave the room yourself. It’s quiet, slow and stubbornly ordinary, which is both its strength and its limitation. I admired it more consistently than I loved it, but it’s one of the few infidelity dramas that feels like it might be happening in the flat downstairs.

good film - Tuesday, After Christmas review by ma

first time ive seen this film and i have to say it was a enjoyable film to watch the only bit thats disapointing is having to read the subtitles all the way through it as this film is not in english would have been better in english as the subtitles are distrating and cant get into the story