The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 12, 2006
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
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
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.