The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Making its first appearance at last year's NY Film Festival and now
scheduled for release at the Film Forum in April, "The Death of Mr.
Lazarescu" is the harrowing tale of Lazarescu Dante Remus, a desperately
ill 62 year old man, who like his namesake descends into an inferno made up
of four different hospital emergency rooms in Bucharest over the course of
an entire night.

Defying conventional cinematic expectations, director and screenwriter
Cristi Puiu has made his central character totally unremarkable. Indeed,
the only thing that distinguishes him--like Tolstoi's Ivan Illich--is the
fact that he is sick and will die.

We first meet Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) in his dingy apartment that he
shares with three cats. Widowed for a number of years, his only solace is
in his pets and in alcohol. For the entire day he has been suffering from
an acute headache and stomach ache. Only after he begins to vomit blood
does he decide to call an ambulance. When his next door neighbors, a
rough-hewn husband and wife distracted from their jelly-making chores, come
to his aid, all they can do is lecture him about how his drinking will kill
him and offer him homeopathic remedies. The interaction between Lazarescu
and his neighbors has a dry comic quality that pervades the film until a
darker tone sets in as illness deepens. No matter how much poor Lazarescu
complains about his stomach ache, the wife seems determined that he eat
some of the moussaka she has whipped up.

After the ambulance finally arrives, a female paramedic named Marioara
(Mirela Cioaba) examines Lazarescu and decides that he needs to be taken
immediately to the hospital. It is Lazarescu's bad luck to have fallen ill
the very same day that a highway accident involving a bus has filled
Bucharest's emergency rooms. Since the doctors, nurses and practically
everybody who smells his breath decide that Lazarescu's problems are
nothing more than a bad hangover, they either neglect him or pass him on to
the next hospital like a baton in a relay race.

When they finally begin to examine him, they scold him for his drinking and
generally treat him like a piece of meat. When he pees in his pants during
a CAT scan, the attending physician heaps abuse on him. The last time I saw
such callousness on display was in Frederick Wiseman's "Titicut Follies," a
documentary about Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In one
scene, a doctor stands on a gurney above a catatonic patient and pours
liquid food into a funnel connected to a tube that descends into the
patient's mouth, all the while nonchalantly smoking a cigarette.

The only medical professional who treats Lazarescu with dignity and respect
is Mariora, who acts as his Virgil during this descent into hell. Some of
the most powerful scenes involve her speaking up to the doctors who
constantly remind her that she is beneath them and to mind her own
business. Although the film is focused on existential and moral questions,
just as Tolstoi's tale was, it still has a class dimension. Mariora wants
to do her duty as a professional and also probably identifies with
Lazarescu as a fellow member of the lower orders of Romanian society.

However, this film is not really an indictment of Romanian society or an
examination of the economic pressures that have turned medical care in
post-Communist societies into a disaster area. Puiu's main inspiration is
the minimalist cinema of Jim Jarmusch and the idea for making the film came
from watching ER on Romanian television!

Perhaps it is understandable that Eastern European film-makers shy away
from political or social commentary since the oppressive system that they
lived under paid hypocritical lip-service to such an approach.

Although the production notes to "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" do not
mention Hungarian director Bela Tarr, it is obvious that Cristi Puiu is a
kindred spirit since they both acknowledge John Cassavetes as a major
influence and focus on spiritual and moral matters. In a review of Tarr's
"Satantango," a seven hour epic now showing in NYC, Jonathan Rosenbaum
observed that Tarr evolved from a kind of savage social realism to a "dark
metaphysical mode." Such an evolution is probably inevitable as the current
generation of Eastern European and Russian directors find a way to
synthesize earlier political perspectives with newer esthetic and
philosophical outlooks.

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