EMBRACING THE FINAL BOW: THE ARTISTIC ENIGMA OF DEATH IN 'TUESDAY'

Since the first piece of moving footage was photographed, death has been an increasingly familiar presence in cinema: unifying us in wonder at the brevity of life, the inexorability of decay. In a tradition that observes rituals and laments in Bali, Japan, the Pachamama rituals of the Andes, and the memorial lamentations of the Mam都 linguistic group in Africa, even within the confines of Western religion, grief has always been a literary and cinematic fascination, a way to heighten the senses against the certainty of death. Daina O Puséric’s Tuesday gives us a tale that’s as sensual as it is somber; its death is not the upright, gesturing skeleton but rather the bright-plumed, ever-changing shrieking macaw.

THE SPECTRUM OF SENSORY ENGAGEMENT IN 'TUESDAY'

From the very start, Tuesday invites viewers into a world where sensory experience supersedes. In a way, the film captures the totality of life through the reflective eye of a death omen with an unexpectedly vivid presence. The aural follows a precisely constructed din of sound, setting a scene for a story that captures the end of life with a buzz that pervades but is dizzyingly beautiful to listen to. Pusić’s ambition to create this sensorial overload reflects rage and stillness that comes with reckoning with the end of life.

TRANSCENDING TRADITIONS: DEATH'S NEW AVATAR

Take the dark cloaks and silent dark presence of the Reaper, and remake that arrival in terms of the ‘shaky/anxious sound of ash-feathers/As a macaw’ whose ‘the shape…chang[es] as quickly as death…’ The speaker of the poem (Arinzé Kene) gives the macaw a gravity that seems out of place with a bird at all, but it works – it sounds like a menacing presence, ash dripping from its feathers, as the creature appears in front of you, spookily still, and then starts shifting, ‘shaky/anxious’, in a way that makes the presence of death less comfortable, and more dramatically psychic, than the usual personification. By doing this, the poem draws upon the plangent sound of those feathers to remind us of what the macaw is meant to represent, and to widen our attention to the experience of beauty we’ve just had.

THE DICHOTOMy OF HUMOR AND GRIEF

But even here, in a darkly funny addendum that dips its toe into self-parody with the macaw rapping along to Ice Cube’s 1992 song ‘It Was a Good Day’, the movie risks going too far and reins itself in so that the jokes become more and more symbiotic with the grieving process. There’s room for humour in the face of death, and plenty of the absurd, recognising that how we act at our most profound moments of loss can often be absurd too.

A PORTRAIT OF UNYIELDING GRIEF AND LOVE

Ultimately, Tuesday is an intensely personal examination of the relationship between a mother, Zora, played with nuance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and her dying daughter, Tuesday. And when Louis-Dreyfus, still best-known for comedy, adopts a different register and delivers a performance that feels utterly authentic, she demonstrates that Tuesday is a picture much more about what’s in the unsaid than what’s said. It’s about the end of life handled not as melodrama, but as something simpler: as the ultimate test of a parent’s love.

VISUAL METAPHORS & THE JOURNEY TOWARD ACCEPTANCE

Tuesday is filled with visual and thematic metaphors – the macaw of the title, his beak snapped open by an unknown force, conceptualises death’s inevitability – yet while Pusić’s book cannot neglect the loss, neither does it shy away from the messy process of coming to terms with it. Zora’s initial denial, and then her efforts to minimise the oncoming loss, speaks to the grim thievery of grief. It’s a graceless dismantling of the lengths we’ll go to avoid parting ways with those we love.

THE FINAL RESONANCE: EMBRACING LIFE AMIDST DEATH

Eventually, with the last track, ‘Tuesday’ flattens everything out: the rapture, the bright lights, the melodrama. Whatever it was that Lucy and Ray were feeling can no longer be expressed – there is only the raw, unfiltered moment, hammered home by the familiar sound of circling seagulls. For one of the only times in the film, there is no music. It is a moment of quiet clarity. It is in that quiet that Tuesday gives voice to its most affecting message: that death will happen, and that death is not a transgression against life, but a vital and beautiful part of it.

UNDERSTANDING 'SENSE' IN 'TUESDAY'

At the core of Tuesday sits a web of sensorial experiences that defines the experience of life and death. The film’s engagement with the sense, from the audio overstimulation to the visual bombast of the menacing macaw, positions the viewer squarely in the face of our finiteness. The film’s ingenious portrayal of death continually works through sense as the logic of life and its ending. Woven through the narrative is sense as an animating agent, as a surrogate for the experience of life in all its vibrancy and silence. By working sense into the film, Pusić implores viewers to experience the full gamut of human feeling that can also be found in some of the most abject experiences.

Sense in Tuesday is not just a device of narrative, it is a character in the drama, as chaotic and beautiful and, inevitably, as silent as human experience. Every sense encounter in the book – sound, sight, feeling – becomes something of death’s reminder that what we have is almost gone. Tuesday is a movie that lives on long after the end credits. It is art that actually makes sense of art.