Dial M for Emergency

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

By Quintín

It took quite a fight, but finally good judgment prevailed, and my Un Certain Regard jury gave the Fondation GAN prize to Moartea Domnului Lazarescu, which means The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in Romanian—a language rarely spoken in winning films of any kind. At the Cannes closing party, director Cristi Puiu came with a DVD in his pocket. The title was Cigarettes and Coffee, a short that won Berlin ’s Golden Bear in 2004, made as homage to Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes shorts. Puiu finally had the chance to meet Jarmusch and give him his work, which the American had never seen but had “heard about.” It took a long trip for the meeting: Puiu came to Cannes from Bucharest by car, like Lars von Trier used to do, but without the publicity . Puiu doesn’t fly, but he doesn’t drive himself, either: the driving was shared by his wife and his producer (the three of them are partners in the production company Mandragora, “created to support auteur cinema,” as stated in the film’s press book, not as a trans-European teamster union). Puiu describes himself as “very hypochondriac,” and that provided the starting point for a film about medicine.

I’ve never seen Cigarettes and Coffee, but in 2002 I served as a juror in Thessaloniki where Puiu’s first feature, Stuff and Dough, a road movie about two young men getting hooked up with the Romanian Mob—ironically, a film that takes place almost entirely in a car—was in the competition. (By the way, the dismissal of president Theo Angelopoulos and director Michel Demopoulos from the Thessaloniki festival was not only a scandal, but a sure way to prevent anything close to Puiu’s film from being shown in the years to come.) Nuri Bilge Ceylan and I thought that the Romanian film was the best of the lot, but president John Boorman and the rest of the jury thought completely (and wrongly) otherwise. This year in Cannes a moment came when I said to myself, “Oh, not again!” but after that point, jury head Alexander Payne came gracefully to his good senses, and things went smoothly for Mr. Lazarescu (the film, certainly not the man).

Although I was impressed by Puiu’s debut, I was not prepared for this second feature, an explosion and an exercise in grandeur. Played by Ion Fiscuteanu , often on his back, Lazarescu Dante Remus is a drunken widower who is lonely, retired, smelly, bad tempered, and surrounded by ugly cats and stupid neighbours. One day, he wakes up feeling ill, with a headache and stomach pain. He will end his journey early the next morning lying unconscious, prepared to undergo an operation that won’t save him, after entering four different hospitals in the outskirts of Bucharest and having his stubbornness matched by the most sinister bureaucrats of the Romanian medical profession.

With it endless night that takes two-hours-and-34 minutes in sordid apartments and nightmarish hospitals—most of the scenes are shot in so-called real time, all handheld—The Death of Mr. Lazarescu cannot be described as light. But the film is far from being dull or heavy-handed due to the fabulous, complex, and intriguing construction of slopes that accumulate to an overwhelming effect, even as these slopes cleverly differ. Every doctor, every nurse, every part of every hospital is different, and the multiple portrait of a monster of a thousand faces amounts to more than just a choral film: what’s most striking in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the organic behaviour of the medical body. The film, entirely fictitious, can be compared to a documentary by Frederick Wiseman, with its unique ability to make institutions speak.

But Puiu’s work goes way beyond social commentary. Its raw material is not the hospital, but cinema itself. Puiu’s film is a system where all kinds of signifiers are allowed to flow, where a continuum of meanings pile one on top of the other. Take, for instance, the symbolic names: Lazarus, Angel, Virgil, Dante. These are names that resound powerfully but never have any obvious associations. As the director points out, for instance, we know that Jesus resurrected Lazarus, but nobody has ever told the story of his death. And so on: Remus founded Rome and was fed by the she-wolf, but nobody knows where he came from. It’s as if the characters make up the nocturnal side of some world of enlightenment. It’s also as if some weird, black humour could be the only way of traversing the frontier between both sides, between official and private languages, between words and facts, between the general atmosphere of inhumanity and the occasional glimpses of care and tenderness.

Lazarescu is only 63, but he is treated as a useless piece of junk. Everything and everyone conspires against him: his bad mood, his drinking habits, the quality of the emergency services, aggravated that night by a horrific bus accident that led to hundreds of victims. But, above all, Mr. Lazarescu’s enemy is authoritarianism, so embodied in Romanian society (and elsewhere), and so easy to adopt as a maxim by the members of the medical profession, leading to the contempt and mistreatment of patients. But the film functions along the lines of a thriller, not only because of the mysteries of medical diagnosis and its procedures based on hints and clues, but also because it’s obstructed by laziness and arrogance. Nobody knows what’s wrong with Mr. Lazarescu, but he slowly and steadily deteriorates until he reaches a state where he can no longer communicate. Ironically enough, everybody puts forward his or her guess before the truth is established, though by that time, maybe it’s no longer important. Puiu’s treatment of the subject is so intelligent that he even builds a suspense that is very difficult to appreciate, although it’s essential for the plot.

While displacements in the city are horizontal, and the descent towards the circles of hell is vertical, Puiu’s film assumes a tone very similar to the favorite genre of this year’s Cannes , the Western. In every new medical center, new doctors and interns emerge acting like sheriffs of a new town. They are in control, they have absolute power and they are unavoidably cynical, but their hundreds of nuances prevent them from seeming identical, and detach the doctors from their behavioural masks. Wonderful lines of dialogue are uttered, and extraordinary and colorful characters are seen in the stations where Lazarescu’s infernal trip happens to stop. The climax arrives in the last hospital at dawn. After the terrible night has passed, when everything is calm and everybody is dead tired, a woman doctor in a nightgown emerges from nowhere with a dark, slow voice, sounding like a brothel owner from the Wild West. She knows everything and has the clue to every enigma, even to the misconduct of her colleagues. Around her is silence: it’s a magical moment—one of black magic. (Finally, like Stuff and Dough, the film can be thought as a kind of road movie—with the ambulance as the protagonist.)

Puiu emerges from this Cannes not only as an extremely competent filmmaker, capable of delivering a film of such complexity, but also as one of the few in the world that after two films is very close to a master. The impressive solidity of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu lies on skills that extend far beyond technical matters: a sense of deep humanity keeps the film from being academic, didactic, or cruel, in spite of the weight of its subject. There is an attitude of restraint, a sense of modesty in the film that doesn’t prevent the exposure of the truth (to the extent that Puiu doesn’t show death in front of the camera): the same sense of ethics is required for the proper practice of medicine. The unforgettable experience of watching Puiu’s film in the worst of contexts (fatigue, confusion, hypnosis) is a vaccine against frivolity and manipulation, drugs that emerging filmmakers find easy to use in order to make a strong impression in Cannes .

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

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