Those of us movie critics fortunate enough to be in this line of work are always trying to squeeze another two hours or so out of the week to catch one more new film. Because you never know. Which is to say: I’m extremely happy to have seen “Tuesday,” which demands and receives new and challenging things from Julia Louis-Dreyfus while announcing a formidable new filmmaker, the Croatian writer-director Daina O.
Pusić. She has created an imperfect but singular fairy tale for adults, but not just adults, really. There’s real magic and deep feeling behind it.
Allow me to describe it deceptively. “Tuesday” is the name of the 15-year-old girl using a wheelchair, hooked up to IVs, in the care of a home nurse while the girl’s mother works. Even when she’s not working, the mother, Zora, played by Louis-Dreyfus, doesn’t spend much meaningful time with her girl.
Tuesday is dying. Zora isn’t coping well. Grief has a way of arriving before a loved one dies, and Zora’s grief has thrown her into a nervous whirlwind of busyness and chatter.
Now for the fantastical aspect of “Tuesday.” The first character we meet in Pusić’s story is a macaw, in fact a Macaw of Death. (The bird, which can radically size-shift from teeny-tiny to halfway-to-Kong size, is billed in the credits simply as “Death.
”) With a brief, calm wave of its wing, Death brings the end to humans whose laments Death has heard, and will heed. This grubby but remarkable bird, badly in need of a b.
