August
27
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TUESDAY (15)
TUESDAY (15)
Director: Daina O. Pusić
Runtime: 111 minutes
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Leah Harvey, Arinzé Kene
Synopsis: A mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in a profoundly moving performance) and her teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew) must confront Death when it arrives in the form of an astonishing talking bird. From debut filmmaker Daina O. Pusić, Tuesday is a heart-rending fairy tale about the echoes of loss and finding resilience in the unexpected.
URL: https://youtu.be/qvqyBWCN39o?si=vBQfbiOQALSTJ9KT
Zora (Julia Louis Dreyfus) has a 15-year-old wheelchair-bound daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew ) has an incurable terminal illness and Death comes to her in the form of a size-altering macaw to give her final deliverance from pain and suffering. Tuesday realises who and what the talking size-shifting bird is, and asks it not to kill her until her mother arrives home. Zora, on seeing Death and hearing it say that she needs to say good-bye to her daughter because every life must come to an end, at first tries to catch the macaw, and then tricks Death into going into the garden, where she bashes it repeatedly with a heavy book and sets fire to it. On hearing Death’s dogged exhortation that Tuesday must die, Zora puts the badly charred bird into her mouth and swallows it whole.
In Tuesday a mother and her teenage daughter are confronted with Death in the form of a talking bird in this fantasy drama.
Daina O. Pusić’s debut feature is a deeply moving fantasy/fairy-tale with deeply heart-felt performances from both Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lola Petticrew
Tuesday sings the echoes of loss and finding resilience in the unexpected.
A meditation on mortality it is full of risky stylistic gambits but
Tuesday achieves real grace thanks to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ committed performance and writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusic’s impressive ambition.
Like the angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, this macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene) tunes into the sounds of people – or indeed of all living things – but instead of merely observing them, it visits upon them the death they are awaiting, and is indeed death’s feathered embodiment. The film’s prologue both shows the bird at work, passing from one moribund person to the next, and also exhibits its workings both on a cosmic scale, and up close and personal.
Tuesday is a magical realist allegory, dramatising our feelings about mortality – grief, denial, acceptance, despair – and interrogating what a good death might even mean. The intense mother-daughter relationship at its heart, filled as much with warmth and humour as with panic and dread, affords the viewer an easy, empathetic route into the film’s more obscure themes.
Tuesday is a moving and compassionate fable that honours both the dying and those being left behind, while personifying, without ever demonising, death itself.
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Images courtesy of : A24
