A big cat escapes back into the wild, forcing a young married couple to face a calamitous day of reckoning, in Romanian writer-director Andrei Tanase’s debut feature Day of the Tiger. Partly inspired by a real incident, this emotionally charged chase drama pays minimal heed to the established drabcore aesthetic of Romanian New Wave cinema, instead favouring a sunny summer palette, breezy pacing, jaunty music and a light sprinkle of absurdist farce. Screening in the Bright Future section of Rotterdam film festival this week, a dedicated platform for first-time film-makers, Tanase’s creature feature is likeable and engaging, even if it ultimately lacks bite, miaowing when it should roar.
Day of the Tiger begins with Vera (Catalina Moga), a vet based at a zoo in a small Romanian city, helping to sedate and transport Rihanna, a tiger previously kept as an illegal pet by a small-time gangster in his disused swimming pool. Once the new arrival has settled in her cage, Vera heads home via her donwtown office, where she witnesses her actor husband Toma (Paul Ipate) having sex with another woman. Shaken and furious, she returns to the zoo in shock, then carelessly falls asleep in the middle of feeding Rihanna through an open gate. Next morning, the tiger has gone.
The search for Rihanna soon becomes a police matter, then a media circus, with TV reporters, veteran big game hunters, machete-swinging criminals and random tourists all caught up in the drama. Day of the Tiger hovers on the edge of comic romp here, but as the search party comb the wooded wilderness around the zoo, Vera and Toma share some bitter truths about their troubled marriage. In an unrelated side plot, it emerges that the pair recently lost a baby boy when he was just four days old, and are now battling against dogmatic clerics to have his body re-buried on sacred ground, even though this breaks Orthodox church rules on unbaptised children. In a wounding twist, Vera blames Toma’s serial infidelity for their domestic tragedy. “That’s why the baby didn’t live,” she says. Ouch.
Switching into chase thriller mode in its final stages, Day of the Tiger eventually allows Vera and Toma a degree of healing closure, but not without more tragic twists first. Impressively, cast and crew are working with real tigers here (two are listed in the credits) under the direction of veteran French animal handler Thierry le Portier, whose long list of past projects includes Gladiator (2000) and Life of Pi (2012). Close-up shots of Vera with Rihanna certainly look strikingly authentic and crackle with tension, especially a bloody final showdown in the grounds of a luxury villa.
Lean and pacy, Day of the Tiger remains gently compelling from end to end, even if it never quite delivers any deeper statements or definitive conclusions about the emotional turbulence on screen. Frustratingly, Tanase’s screenplay is full of potentially rich dramatic and thematic elements that he only hints at here: strong suggestions that Rihanna has re-awakened Vera’s dormant maternal instincts, the colourful back story of the minor gangster characters, the caustic critique of heartless church dogma, and so on. A tail-wagging pleasure to watch, but more of a shaggy dog story than the sharp-clawed feline fable it could have been.
Director, screenwriter: Andrei Tanase
Cast: Cataina Moga, Paul Ipate, Alex Velea
Cinematography: Barbu Balasoiu
Editing: Smaro Papaevangelou
Music: JB Dunckel
Producers: Anamaria Antoci, Irena Isbasescu, Adrian Silisteanu
Production companies Domestic Film (Romania), Altamar Films (France), Graal (Greece)
World sales: Totem Films
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Bright Future)
In Romanian
80 minutes
