The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is exactly what it says it is, the chronicle of a man who dies. For a film with a seemingly straight forward object of its story, the actual subject is not so simple, and in the end, problematic and unconvincing. The man-to-die of the title is 62-year old Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu, in a performance of naturalistic magnificence), who starts the evening with minor head and stomach aches and generally gets worse from there. He calls an ambulance early on but it takes so long to arrive that Lazarescu bothers the neighbors for various medications to sooth his fluctuating ails (one minute his head, the next his stomach; later a nurse says its his colon, another says he is drunk, another his liver, etc.), and they are the first in a procession of various people who chastise Lazarescu for his slovenliness and drinking without truly diagnosing anything and, though sometimes not without some kindness, generally impede his recovery. After Lazarescu leaves his apartment and his beloved cats (who appear his only friends in the whole world) he inexplicably grows more and more debilitated, confused, silent, and passive. Soon he essentially registers only as a visual presence, nearly a MacGuffin for propelling the film along. This eventual lapse in interest from Lazarescu significantly shifts the burden of our attention to the characters around him, namely the nurse (Mireal Cioaba) that sticks with him all night shuttling him from hospital to hospital, as well as the various doctors and nurses they encounter along the way.

These medical personal are vividly rendered through the film’s unobtrusive camerawork and stellar cast. They treat Lazarescu with various amounts of concern, cynicism, disbelief, lack of caring, and professionalism (or not)— litmus tests for that big concept that is irritatingly, implicitly central to the film, the wildly varying degrees of humanity in these characters. The photography by Oleg Mutu is of the disappointingly typical docu-drama variety of handheldness, but Mutu has a smart, natural sense of composition and Puiu’s blocking on his long takes makes the style both immediate and contemplative. The doctoral reactions are all potent, alive, and generally disturbing without seeming exaggerated: a staff made entirely of narcoleptic women at the end of their shifts, a neurosurgery department who egotistically guard the class hierarchy of knowledge in the medical profession, a nice doctor who may be kind, but mainly goes out of his way for Lazarescu because he is being treated by the doctor's girlfriend. The photography, the sense of a real-time temporal passage of frustrations, and the always curious variety of situations go a long way to make this long film interesting beyond its dead-off-his-feet protagonist and the indignation we are suppose to feel for his humiliation and debasement during this process. As well acted and realistically scripted as they are, the episodic scenarios are hardly a study of the fallacies, absurdities, benefits, and failings of the Romanic healthcare system, let alone a chronicle of the kindness and cruelty of the medical profession in the middle of the night. The film gives the aura of putting the audience in a place to judge how these people treat the object of the film’s interest—Lazarescu as humanity—but to take this position would be to make hasty and unfair assessment of the difficult, trying profession of ER doctors. The encounters therefore register more as black comedy variations on a theme—the variables that define the way people treat each other—and though the well-written variety of nurse-doctor banter is entertaining and illuminating, the subject of the eventual death of Lazarescu oddly fades from importance within the film.

The fact that we don’t actually see Lazarescu die—the film ends in a cut to black that does not finalize anything—could imply one of two things. The first is that anytime a movie ends, its protagonists, in fact all its characters, cease to be “alive,” and thus Puiu’ film is really a literalization, and realization for the audience, of narrative fiction cinema being about the inevitable encroaching “death” of its protagonists—the end of the film. However, this analysis does not really work because few characters in conventional narrative film grow as distant and uninteresting as Lazarescu quickly does in Puiu's film. The other possibility is that Lazarescu was either already “dead” when the movie started, or he “died” sometime during its runtime. Since the film, for better or for worse, withholds overt spiritual intrusions into the diegesis, this theoretical death registers as all the more tragic—with Lazarescu quickly incapacitated before our eyes, we neither know him enough to tell if or when he dies nor to truly care when it occurs. These conclusions are almost fascinating in and of themselves, and befits Puiu's ambitious but generally innocuous structuring of his film and focus on real-time drama, but the main problem is that even though Lazarescu is the film’s lead character, and his death the subject, by the end neither has much importance. Our interest shifts to the “live” characters around our lead but the position the audience is placed in relation to them one only of moral high ground, sabotaging a grim, sharply directed, slow but methodically driven temporal expansion of a man’s last few hours.


My initial problems in regards to the film’s positioning of the audience in a place of smug judgment faded dramatically upon revisiting the movie. Instead, the impression that each episodic sequence is created out of the same dramatic, narrative, ethical, and moral ideas, and performed and repeated as a variation several times on the film’s theme comes across very strongly. As does the supreme skill of the naturalist ensemble cast, who provide a carousel impression of the sheer variety and nuance of life outlook that can be found in humanity, each and every actor bouncing off the body of Lazarescu in a different and interesting way. The film still seems to waft away in post-viewing memory though, which I may blame on the material’s generic similarity to the oft-mentioned television show ER. Puiu’s rigor and skill as a director is what keeps the film emotionally and viscerally immediate throughout though, calling to mind the NBC show only in afterthought, and never through out the unexpectedly tender progression of Lazarescu’s death.