Romanian Movie “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” Premiere in Washington DC
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, a Romanian movie directed by Cristi Puiu and awarded in the 2005 Cannes Film Festival will be launched in Washington DC at the Landmark's E-Street Cinema (555 11th Street NW, Washington, DC 20004; Hours: 11:00am I 2:10 I 5:20 I 8:30)
Cast: Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminita Gheorghiu, Gabriel Spahieu, Doru Ana, Dana Dogaru, Florin Zamfirescu, Clara Voda, Adrian Titieni, Mihai Bratila, Monica Barladeanu
Directed by: Cristi Puiu
Genre(s): Comedy, Drama
Run Time: 153 min.
Rating: R (MPAA)
Synopsis
After suffering terrible headaches and stomach cramps that he can no longer bare, Mr. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) calls for an ambulance, beginning one man's poignant journey through Bucharest hospitals in search of proper medical care. His lone ally, medic Mioara (Luminta Gheorghiu), admirably fights for his life with compassion and decency. However, cursed with viciously ironic luck and fumes of alcohol on his breath, Mr. Lazarescu is treated with scorn, indifference and little else as he slips deeper into oblivion.
MOVIE REVIEW
"In a real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o'clock in the morning," F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote in "The Crack-Up." That's all very pretty and sad, but what about the real dark night of the body? That's not so pretty. You may be able to stop killing your soul with drink, but you can't stop your body from dying.
The grinding ordeal endured by the ailing title character of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," a thorny masterpiece by the Romanian director Cristi Puiu, concludes well after 3 a.m. in a Bucharest hospital as he lies dying, unattended on a gurney. That's more than five hours after this 62-year-old patient (Ion Fiscuteanu) is carted by ambulance from his shabby, foul-smelling apartment to the first of four unwelcoming city hospitals. As the hours slip away, his strength deteriorates and his speech declines from gnarly complaining to barely audible nonsense into silence.
The two-and-a-half hour film views this late-night descent of the allegorically named Dante Remus Lazarescu through circles of medical hell observed with eyes that are dispassionate but far from cold. A sustained triumph of ensemble acting, the film seems so absolutely real it absorbs you into its world the same way a documentary like Frederick Wiseman's 1970 "Hospital" seeps into your consciousness.
Like Mr. Wiseman's epic documentaries, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" observes the relentless processing of human beings by impersonal social institutions. If you have ever found yourself left alone in a chilly room wearing a hospital gown in glaring fluorescent light, you will recognize that this is the way it is; you've become a harshly objectified human specimen: tiny, alone and vulnerable.
"The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is only the second film by Mr. Puiu, who wrote the screenplay with Razvan Radulescu. Mr. Puiu describes his movie as the first in a six-part cycle of "love stories" envisioned as an answer to Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," although the resemblances between Mr. Puiu and Mr. Rohmer are far from obvious.
Some viewers may contest his description of this first installment as expressing "love of humanity." (Future films in the series will address love between men and women, love for one's children, love of success, love between friends and carnal love.) But beneath its radically unsentimental surface, Mr. Puiu's feeling for human connectedness is palpable; the movie wears a grim smirk.
Another influence he has cited is the television series "ER," which is syndicated in Romania . But where "ER," has "movement in every direction," he writes in the production notes, Romanian doctors move "in slow motion," as if they had all the time in the world. The director is also a self-confessed hypochondriac, and his channeling of his neurosis into the film lends it an extra intensity.
Although "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" withholds all but the barest facts about its protagonist, we know this: He is a retired engineer, a month shy of 63, whose wife died eight years earlier and who now shares his shabby apartment with three beloved cats. He has a married sister in a nearby city, whom he helps to support, and a married daughter in Toronto . Fourteen years earlier he had surgery for ulcers. Against doctors' orders, he has continued to drink heavily (a sickly sweet concoction called Mastropol). The stench of alcohol on his breath elicits no end of scolding from a succession of doctors who treat him like a naughty child.
On the day of his hospitalization, Lazarescu has a splitting headache and recurrent bouts of vomiting. He calls an ambulance that doesn't come until his next-door neighbors, to whom he goes to for aspirin, call again.
It finally arrives, and with it, a nurse, Mioara Avram (Luminita Gheorghiu), a woman in her mid-50's who remains his only steady advocate over the grueling hours ahead. Based on his complaints and on her cursory examination, she decides he probably has cancer. But the doctors who subsequently examine him overrule her.
Lazarescu has chosen an unfortunate day to become seriously ill. The first three hospitals he visits are jammed with injured survivors from a bus accident that left many dead. The tests he requires are administered only reluctantly after delays and much haggling. After each visit he is sent to a different hospital, carrying his own test results.
Wherever he goes, the doctors and nurses are gruff, impatient, cold and sarcastic. In the nastiest contretemps Mioara is rudely shushed by arrogant doctors who upbraid her for not knowing her place near the bottom of the hospital hierarchy.
Mioara is no saint, and her patience has its limits. And until his energy drains away, Lazarescu himself is a pesky handful of complaints and demands. But by remaining at his side into the wee small hours while the rest of the world flutters around him, distracted and frazzled, she does the human thing. As the filmmaker well knows, a love of humanity gleams most brightly in places where it is conspicuous in its absence.
The movie is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity and strong language.
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Opens today in Manhattan .
Directed by Cristi Puiu; written (in Romanian, with English subtitles) by Mr. Puiu and Razvan Radulescu; director of photography, Oleg Mutu; music by Andreea Barbu; produced by Alexandru Munteanu; released by Tartan Films. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue, South Village. Running time: 154 minutes.
WITH: Ion Fiscuteanu (Mr. Lazarescu), Luminita Gheorghiu (Mioara Avram), Gabriel Spahieu (Leo), Doru Ana (Sandu Sterian), Dana Dogaru (Miki Sterian) and Florin Zamfirescu (Dr. Ardelean).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/movies/26deat.html?pagewanted=print
ARTS AND LEISURE DESK |
FILM; Failure May Be Cruel, but Success Can Be Sickening |
By ALAN RIDING (NYT) 1053 words
Published: April 23, 2006
PARIS - FOR a movie director who spent two years suffering from severe hypochondria, it might seem reassuring to shoot in a hospital. Unless, of course, the story's central character expires. And that much is already announced in the title of Cristi Puiu's award-winning film, ''The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.''
Fortunately, this is more of a ''What if?'' movie. ''I wanted to give a certain shape to this fear of dying alone, of no one else around paying attention to me,'' said Mr. Puiu, 38, showing no signs of ill health during a recent visit to Paris from his native Romania . ''I experienced this and I wanted to tell it.''
In ''The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,'' which opens on Wednesday for two weeks at the Film Forum in New York , Mr. Puiu's stand-in is Dante Remus Lazarescu, a retired engineer and widower who lives in a grim Bucharest apartment with his three cats. His daughter has emigrated to Canada and his out-of-town sister takes much of his pension. His only consolation is the bottle.
This, at least, is not autobiographical, although alcoholism is a serious problem in Romania . But Mr. Puiu had to invent little to come up with the rest of the story. ''There was a case around 2000 when an ambulance drove a patient around to lots of hospitals which refused him,'' he said. ''Eventually, the nurse accompanying him left him on a street to die.''
In the movie, Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) appears to have a stroke. After his neighbors and a nurse blame his drinking, they eventually call an ambulance. Three hospitals find reasons not to admit in. In the fourth, after being prepared for surgery and left to wait, he dies, alone.
The film casts a skeptical eye on hospital life: its crises and tedium, as well as its self-important doctors, flirtatious nurses and enduring patients. There is plenty of humor in the film, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year. But the humor can be dark.
By ''undressing'' doctors, Mr. Puiu seems intent on avenging himself against the medical profession. ''When I said I was ill, they said, 'Please go home,' '' he recalled in fluent English. ''When I really was ill, having blood pumped from my stomach, a doctor came to me chewing gum. 'Is this serious?' I asked. 'Yes, you're going to die,' he said -- and left. He could not have been serious, but there was no sign of irony.''
Giving Lazarescu's experience a certain universality, the hospitals where Mr. Puiu spent 39 nights for filming look clean, modern and fairly well equipped. With public health budgets being squeezed throughout Europe , stories of government hospitals turning away emergency cases are also becoming increasingly common in more developed countries.
Where the movie assumes a more Romanian identity, perhaps, is in the public's -- the patients' -- passivity in the face of authority, even 16 years after the ouster of the country's home-grown tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu. Anyone with authority, including doctors, has the last word. ''As a country, we have not come to terms with our past,'' Mr. Puiu said. In his own case, psychotherapists attributed his hypochondria to his inability to manage either failure or success. And of these, he has known both.
One memory still haunts him: his failure to pass an entry examination for a special art-focused high school when he was 14. At the time, he was devoted to painting, but instead he was channeled into a science and engineering education. It was years before he returned to painting.
After high school, he was drafted for military service. Because he had an aunt in Britain , he was placed in a unit of young men of questionable loyalty to the regime. And since the unit was not trusted with guns, Mr. Puiu watched the December 1989 Romanian uprising on television.
There was a touch of Balkan surrealism to what followed. ''I was told that if I gave four packets of cigarettes to a lieutenant, he would give me a certificate proclaiming me a hero of the revolution,'' he said, ''and I could get an apartment. So I called my brother and he brought me the cigarettes and I was given a certificate saying I fought courageously.''
''But when I left the army,'' he went on, ''I learned some friends had been shot and one was killed, so I didn't go any further with the certificate. The whole country was living a lie. Everything was a big lie. I have the certificate as proof of the lie. I was not a revolutionary. I was not interested in politics.''
Still, the end of the dictatorship enabled Mr. Puiu to move to Switzerland , where he studied first jewelry making, then painting and finally cinema. In 1996, after four years away, he returned to Bucharest and found work in television and advertising. His first feature film, ''Stuff and Dough,'' was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at the 2001 Cannes festival.
But this recognition plunged him into a depression that took the form of hypochondria, Mr. Puiu said. ''The problem is that I am not used to success,'' he insisted. Nor, it seems, is Romania . Even after his short, ''Cigarettes and Coffee,'' won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004, his request for financing for a new feature film was initially turned down. ''I wrote to the minister of culture,'' he said, ''and the money came through.''
''The Death of Mr. Lazarescu'' has since been released around Europe and was Romania 's candidate for this year's Academy Award for best foreign-language film. It was also the most popular Romanian film shown in Romania last year, although it was seen by just 30,000 people. ''In 1989, we had 420 screens in the country,'' Mr. Puiu said. ''Now there are only 140.''
Still, he is pressing on with a project that he calls ''Six Stories From the Bucharest Suburbs,'' with each story, or movie, tackling a different aspect of love. But do not expect romance: ''The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,'' after all, was the first in the series -- devoted to love of humanity.
''I'd next like to make a film about love in a couple,'' he said, ''or rather, the lack of love. It has to be like that. It's not giving answers. It's raising questions.''
Photos: At left, the director Cristi Puiu. Above, Ion Fiscuteanu as the title character in ''The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.'' The darkly comic film casts a skeptical eye on hospital life and on passivity in the face of authority. (Photo by Ed Alcock for The New York Times); (Photo by Tartan Films)
