Review of Tuesday, After Christmas

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.