The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) – C. Puiu

I’ve now seen reference to a new genre called “21^st Century Realist” films, which may feel like the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman but which are really fully scripted and mounted by professional actors who nevertheless stage their photoplay in real settings, sometimes surrounded by nonprofessional real people.  The other key example would likely be 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) directed by Cristian Mungiu, where two women seek an illegal abortion.  The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is also a Romanian film, directed by Cristi Puiu, sparking the notion that this is a specifically Romanian genre – but, no, I think one might be able to include the films of the Dardennes brothers (although they began in the 1990s).  Not unlike the Belgian masters, Puiu guides his narrative straight into the heart of darkness, where people at odds with society (often due to poverty or fractured relations with others) are scrabbling to keep things together in the face of unfeeling social institutions.  Here, aging Mr. Lazarescu (first name: Dante; played by the late Ion Fiscuteanu) is sent on a journey into the hell that is the Bucharist hospital system when he calls an ambulance to report a bad headache and complications from an earlier ulcer. As the film progresses, we switch our identification from Lazarescu to his angel of mercy, paramedic Mioara Avram (played by Luminita Gheorghiu), who guides him through four separate emergency rooms, meeting an assortment of mostly hostile and arrogant doctors who simultaneously clarify his diagnosis and delay his treatment.  The more we identify with Mrs. Mioara, the more Lazarescu becomes a dehumanized body, poked and prodded, put through the CT scanner, talked about as though he weren’t there, or infantilized.  There is a vein of very dark humour running throughout, underscoring the preposterousness of everything, and brilliantly creating a firewall against tears (which surely should come).  Indeed, for all of its 150 minutes, I was never less than completely absorbed in the unpredictable events onscreen; for me, unlike for Lazarescu or Mioara, the time flew by.  In the end, the real point here seems to be to pillory a system that treats death as something ignominious – here’s hoping that none of us is that unfortunate.