A Tale from the Bucharest Hospitals:
Cristi Puiu on The Death of Mister Lazarescu

By Christoph Huber

By the end of the sparsely attended press screening of Cristi Puiu’s second feature The Death of Mister Lazarescu at last year’s Cannes festival, about a dozen people had remained in their seats. Although most of them were enthusiastic, it did not exactly look as if the verité-style, 164-minute Romanian epic about a hard-drinking, somewhat unpleasant, probably very smelly, and most certainly very doomed old man’s desperate night-long odyssey though overcrowded hospitals would turn out to be one of the great festival successes of 2005. However, that is precisely what has happened. Since its deserved win in the “Un certain regard” section, Puiu’s film has not only made the grand festival circuit parade, but also was picked up for distribution in quite a few territories, including North America .

I remember buyers joking sight unseen about the impossibility of “the very long Romanian hospital movie” being an audience draw, but Lazarescu is a quite gripping, at times even visceral, tour-de-force. Its hand-held, long-take, near-real time style and its remarkably assured unraveling of institutional procedures has drawn comparisons to Frederick Wiseman, whom Puiu greatly admires. But despite the virtuoso verité and the near-invisibility of acting (the doctors and nurses especially feel staggeringly real), Lazarescu has the drive of fictional narrative, straightforwardly following its titular anti-hero’s (“played by Ion Fiscuteanu, mostly on his back,” to quote Quintín’s Cannes Cinema Scope review) descent into unconsciousness—a far cry from Wiseman’s associative (and basically protagonist-free) montage patterns, even if one emerges with a similar feel of panoramic vision.

That narrative drive and Puiu’s acknowledgment of the hospital TV series E.R. as a reference point bolster a literal reading of the film as an exposé of the deficiencies of the Romanian health care system. As Puiu himself stresses, this is an almost inexcusable constriction. As the first of a Rohmer-inspired cycle called “Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs”—short treatments for all others are already written—each exploring a different facet of love, Lazarescu was conceived as an examination of “love for one’s fellow man,” and expands on a number of existential questions from there. There are additional layers, as for instance suggested by the allegorical nature of many character’s names: the protagonist’s full name is Lazarescu Dante Remus, on the way he will encounter a Virgil, call the paramedic who accompanies him throughout the night “Beatrice,” and near the end an angel awaits. But here as elsewhere Puiu avoids any obvious symbolism, the same way he avoids all-too-easy judgments, and delves into rich ambivalences. Although the technical mastery on display is dazzling, it’s the deeply felt vision of humanity that gives the film its enduring power.

In sheer scope alone Lazarescu feels like a quantum leap for Puiu, not that his first feature, the road movie Stuff & Dough (2001), in retrospect another odyssey—but much shorter and by car—hadn’t been good enough. But there’s an urgency in Puiu’s exploration of Lazarescu’s themes that is intensely personal—how much of it can be attributed to his self-description as “very hypochondriac” remains a mystery. But it’s probably what’s driven him to open his Bucharest cycle with Lazarescu, “by far the bleakest of the films,” he admits. (The others will centre on “love between a man and a woman,” “love for your children,” “love of success,” “love between friends,” and “carnal love.”) Despite the justified artistic self-confidence behind this decision, in person Puiu is modest, friendly and very humorous. And for a 38-year-old man who refuses to fly and obsesses over his imminent death, he certainly looks astonishingly healthy; though for the record, when I first met him in Linz, Austria, in April 2005 at the Crossing Europe Film Festival where his Golden Bear-winning short Cigarettes and Coffee (2004) screened, he was still visibly exhausted from finishing his second feature. It is worth noting that the festival’s director Christine Dollhofer had to help with a letter of recommendation in appealing for Lazarescu’s funding in Romania —despite his previous successes, Puiu was perceived as lacking credibility.

Puiu bemoans the state of cinema in Romania and co-founded Lazarescu’s production company Mandragora “to support auteur cinema”; he explains that there is only one arthouse cinema in Bucharest (which mostly plays prestige Hollywood movies). He’s mostly given up theatrical moviegoing because he despises the mall’s “popcorn-Coca Cola culture,” epitomizing the lack of respect given films nowadays. “This is probably what made me a member of the DVD generation. I love to watch late at night, when it’s really dark and the sound of the town no longer intrudes,” he finishes one of the multiple digressions in his rather stream-of-consciousness commentary.

Having started to paint at the age of ten, Bucharest-born Puiu embarked to study that field first, leaving for Geneva’s Ecole Supérieure d’art Visuel after the fall of the communist regime, and it took a few years before he turned to cinema, citing Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) as the key introduction to those “special films” that belatedly got him interested. (He’s still painting, and also writing scripts for others, together with regular partner Razvan Radulescu.) But philosophy—and presumably heaps of medical knowledge—seem to be just as important points of reference for him. Still, after we talk, he asks me to recommend a store where he can find “a special film,” as he can hardly get any classics at home. When I point out that the specialized stores in Vienna are likely more expensive than those in Romania , he answers: “But if it’s something really good, like a great Rohmer, it’s enough for a long time.”

Cinema Scope: How did you decide to shoot the film in this style, with long, handheld takes?

Cristi Puiu: I’ve been thinking about the implications of filmic representation ever since I started to get interested in cinema. During my school years in Geneva I started to discover a different, very special kind of filmmaking. I started to study as a painter, but soon discovered film auteurs and their thoughts, like Godard’s famous quote “film is truth at 24 frames per second,” which is, of course, not true, but at the same time I’m very interested in the idea. If you manage to define everything, you can maybe get atleast some taste of the truth, some part of it. Godard also said that “every cut is a lie.” So I said to myself: Maybe between the cuts we can get this taste of truth. And as I wanted to get more of that taste, I had to get these long shots. But it’s also a question of time: to induce the feeling of time passing, it had to be like this. When the neurologist is testing Lazarescu, the duration of the shot is six to seven minutes. This is very important, because it’s so mechanical. It marks the time passing. Adding up these connected actions, you get the sequences—but finally, all the actions and answers are really absurd, because this person is going to die. But it’s the way it has to be, it is really just the normal medical procedure. So it was important to get the test in real time, that’s the point.

Scope: You’ve been quoted as being inspired by the TV series E.R.?

Puiu: Actually, inspired is the wrong word, I’m revolted by it! The way they treat the patients is completely unbelievable. Sure, in the US things are a bit different from Romania : if the patient is paying bills and has insurance, then we pay attention to him. But what disgusts me about E.R. is how the doctors are portrayed, their level of involvement. Of course doctors are human beings and somehow weak, they have their own problems—and they have to help themselves, too! There is this distance they must keep, they should not get emotionally involved. I think it’s the way it has to be: they have to act as machines. They first have to protect themselves to protect others. Let’s assume that in one year you will die. When, as a patient, you’re going to a doctor, you’re expecting to be cured, not to find him crying on your shoulder because of his diagnosis. Then you know you’re finished.

Something else that is very important to me is that my film is not about malpractice. If you watch carefully, you see that the first doctor is touching the liver, and senses that there’s a problem—cancer. Even if the doctor is very rude, he is right. Self-protection can lead to abusing the patient, at least in this case. Another moment like that is when they demand the signature. All other doctors are pretty understandable. Lazarescu for me is not so much about the social level, but the metaphysical level. We are somehow doomed, which leads to paradoxes. For instance, the neighbour’s wife, Miki, is trying to do good things, but she’s coming in with her preconceptions. She doesn’t like the Hungarians, we don’t know why, but she also cleans the slippers. It’s mixed, everything in life is mixed. I wanted this metaphysical aspect, that we are doomed, but not in an obvious way. If I’d shot with the camera on a tripod, it would have been like passing a sentence. It had to be carnal, fleshy, so the audience can discover whatever it wants. It was a risky decision maybe, but it was most important for me to get this metaphysical side. It’s not emphasized, but it’s there. These things are very interesting for people who ask themselves the same questions as I do—the most important and at the same time the most banal questions, really, like “Why are we here?” One can’t say, we don’t understand. Existential and definitive questions: “What’s it all about?”, “Am I caught by the events or do I control them?” All very tricky.

Scope: That’s one of the reasons why I think Lazarescu is great: it has this very philosophical dimension, yet the texture is totally realistic. People have compared it to Wiseman, because of the way you let institutions speak. But many people take the film just at face value, as a portrayal of the Romanian health care system. That’s also there, but it’s far from the be all and end all.

Puiu: Yes, it’s also about those institutions, but firstly it’s about this disappearance, the extinction of a human being, of a soul. He’s going out, just like this. Which of course you could also do with a camera on a tripod, like an experimental film. You know, two-and-a-half hours of the old man dying slowly on his couch. That would also have been really challenging. I always have Hitchcock’s saying in my head, how he’d like to do one film with only one character. Thinking of just one character, Lazarescu, on the couch, it’s like a self-portrait. But I cannot film myself, I am too shy. The first article I read about the film in Cannes was in Libération, and it was a good review. I was happy, a success for me and the others. But they underlined the fact that it’s about medical health care. It’s about this, yes, but not just that: it’s more about a man who is dying.

The backstory is that in 2001 I became hypochondriac. Suddenly I lost myself. It was before coming to Cannes with my first film, and I became so scared about going there. Before leaving home I went to doctors, searched the Internet, I was convinced that there was something wrong with my colon, that I probably had cancer. Still, I came to Cannes , and I really like the French cuisine, but I couldn’t eat it! No doctor had prepared me for that, of course, because the problem was in my mind! So I ate only grilled veal or cow, never fois gras, and only boiled vegetables. No fruit de mer! A very tough experience. I never stopped searching on the Internet since then, and these really important questions came up strongly. In that period I passed from cancer to thinking I had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which progressively paralyzes you by the atrophying of the muscles. So I was really afraid: what if you’re going to die in three years, but at some point along the way you cannot communicate to others? That’s what scares me most—not being able to communicate. You lose everything, but not intelligence and the senses.

Scope: Which is what happens to Lazarescu in the film, he loses consciousness, and essentially becomes paralyzed.

Puiu: Yes, and maybe he had something important to say! It’s like being trapped in your own body, imprisoned! This is really something difficult to deal with, just speaking of it I have the nightmares in my head again! Once I watched this James Cagney film, I don’t remember its name, a noir from the ‘40s. I really like James Cagney, and I was totally into the film. I know nothing about the US, I’d never been there, I know nothing about the ‘40s, or the spirit of that time—and suddenly while watching the film, the idea popped into my head: If I die now, who will be the one who dies? Me, Romanian citizen Cristi Puiu, with a wife, two kids, and a precise biography? Or the one that identifies with James Cagney, the film, its music and space? This image will be the last image I take with me to the grave, not my biography. You’re living your life building up hopes, there’s a lot of work and emotional involvement. You build up your own world, with your life, your apartment, your kids and everything—and then, the last moment cuts of all of this, it doesn’t exist anymore. And your memory goes into the garbage can. So I thought, fuck, Lazarescu has to follow this, I have to do that. But it must not be emphasized. So all the doctors and the others around him have these little discussions about things that don’t concern the patient. But maybe he will take them with him—dying with somebody else’s story. Imagine that the last thing you hear is about this bus accident. And in the brain you search for images, you have these flashes of TV news—it is really the most absurd thing. And it’s not just the case of Lazarescu, it’s everybody’s case! We leave this world with, I don’t know, maybe a taste of apple, then you get shot, something that really just cuts you off, your memory disappears. It makes no sense. That really scared me, really, really scared me—because it was very hard to find something to rely on. Like a quote from a Zen master. Fucking tell me!

Scope: And of course, despite the title there’s the question: Does Lazarescu really die at the end? He’s lying on the stretcher, but then there is this movement, and the screen goes to black. I mean, he will be unavoidably dying any moment now, but it’s not really in the film.

Puiu: Yes, death is a continuous process here, so to speak. Actually, we don’t think that way because it’s not productive, but from the moment we enter this world, we start dying, every moment. Dying as a continuous action. I had to choose from six or so takes of the final scene, and I chose a take where you could not see him breathe. So maybe he’s dead, maybe not. I didn’t want to stage the death of a person, I think it’s indecent. Also, to do this means using a cinematographic cliché. The doctor who scanned him said that even when operated he’ll die within a few months at home from cancer, so it’s clear that he’ll die, and that’s the idea of the film—I just didn’t want to close the subject matter. It was very important to choose a take so people would think about it. It had to be ambiguous. If you show him normally breathing and then cut—he’s not dying in the film. If you show him freezing—he’s dying in the film. I wanted something in between. The nurse says something about Virgil, maybe Lazarescu moves while it goes through his head (in a very slow voice): “Virgil is my brother-in-law, maybe he came.” I don’t know what is really happening. With his symptoms only the centre of speech is affected, not his intelligence, the access to the memory is still working. He hears Virgil, for him it’s the brother-in-law, so there’s a reaction, a very slow and delayed reaction. I wanted to end the film there; it’s related to what I’m saying. He hears the nurse talking about the bus accident, he hears these flashes of news. Then the nurse is calling for Virgil, “bring Virgil to Angela,” completely different memories are triggered. If I hear, as we are talking in this hotel, someone calling out for Julian, I’d be thinking of my brother and have his image in my head. He had to move in order not to cheat the audience, it’s very subtly related. Ion Fiscuteanu, who plays Lazarescu, is a famous theatre actor and wanted to make his last scene really impressive. But there was a Gillette ad on the wall in the room where we shot the last scene, so I told him to just turn his head and then read the Gillette ad for the right timing, before he comes back. So Gillette became metaphysical.

Scope: So Fiscuteanu is kind of a celebrity in Romania ?

Puiu: Not in Romania , just the Transylvanian town where he comes from, and the half-Hungarian, half-Romanian region around it. He’s the most famous theatre actor there, so there he behaves like a star. Once in Bucharest he was no longer treated that way, which helped a lot. It was very hard working with him, because he was afraid. I told him I really understood this—and I did understand—that it would be a really hard job when we started shooting. But in the beginning he just went, “I can do it! I can do it!” Of course it turned out that it’s not so easy. He told me he thought differently about this character. He had never done anything like it before. In fact this is very current in Romania —the actors do what they’re doing on stage, ignoring the camera and really overacting. So I really had to fight with them! And it was an ordeal: in the hospitals we could only shoot during the night, until 6 a.m. Of course I thought I’d adapt to the different rhythm within a few days. But no! I kept waking up at 9 a.m., then during the day I watched rushes etc., and by night I was staggering around on the set like a zombie, unable to make out anything. It got worse every day, the shooting took around 40 days, and my memory of the night shoots is really hazy. It’s inconceivable how I managed to communicate with the actors.

Scope: But the acting is one of the greatest things about Lazarescu. All the characters come across as if they were real: you immediately believe all these people are doctors!

Puiu: It was difficult for them, too. There is something in actors—like everybody else, they want to be loved. In theatres they’re facing the audience all the time. And there are cases like James Stewart, who reportedly turned down all negative parts. So to “cure” them of their understandable desire to be loved, I told them to adopt this mechanic viewpoint: act not as if a human being were in front of them, but rather a car they have to repair. Everybody tried to be nice at first—of course, they want to be loved, by their neighbours, friends, mothers, it’s very human—but in the end they understood. We have this very efficient tool now, which Fellini did not like, the videotape. I’m not like other directors who don’t allow their actors to watch. I let them have one scene their way, one for me, then allow them to compare. I don’t choose actors for their appearance or ability in dancing or whatever, but because of their intelligence.

The actor who’s playing Miki, the neighbour, was very famous during the ‘80s, but after the collapse of communism she just faded. I auditioned three actresses for the part. First was her, we spent an hour talking about things—and then I didn’t even talk to the others, because we had understood each other. If you have an actor that looks like a killer, but he doesn’t understand his job, you won’t have a killer by the end. It’s not about appearance, it’s about intelligence, this very specific intelligence of actors, which is like the intelligence of a chess player. As with all actors, I chose her because she had that something that the role needed. All except Ion. He was an interesting case to study. When he was bad, he was really bad. I looked through the camera and thought “Fuck! You’re going to destroy my film.” The next day the rushes came from the lab and I saw that it was okay, not brilliant, but manageable. But as it went on, I saw that what I’d thought was bad was good and what I’d thought was good was actually brilliant. It was some form of intuition, I don’t know—he is loved by the microphones and the camera! There is no explanation for it, it was very strange. It was not present at all, but somehow it became metaphysical. At the same time his mind was elsewhere. His lines…he had this memory problem, so he was concentrating all the time, relying on intuition and actorly instinct. It was impossible to get any reflection on acting out of him.

Scope: A friend told me you are influenced by the works of biologist and philosopher Henri Laborit (who plays himself in Mon oncle d’Amerique by Alain Resnais).

Puiu: I was very intrigued by his observation that we are acting in order to dominate others. Which sounds okay when we think about nature, but it’s no longer true once it’s concerning man. Yet Laborit is right, and I think there has to be a big open debate about this. One of the problems is that we are so in love with ourselves. The beginning of Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape says there are 993 species of apes in the world, some with tails and some without etc., and 992 are hairy, only one is without hair and it calls itself homo sapiens. This is really pretentious somehow. Behind it is the idea that you are right, and you have the right to kill. I mean, it’s not as if I’m a vegetarian, but I still have a problem finding my place in the grander scheme of things. Ever since I read Laborit’s book in school in 1996 I’ve had it in my mind, all of the time. Not just him, also Paul Watzlawick, who is very interested in communication and the power to improve yourself. Ernesto Sábato once was asked if art can make human beings better. He replied that there had been someone who performed miracles and human beings didn’t change. That really bothers me. I have enough problems with myself, my everyday life. There are things I’d prefer not to do and so on. But I believe cinema has a function. I don’t like artists, I’m very functional—very German, very Bauhaus. Maybe cinema cannot change people, but there is this physical distance. You have a film, projected on a screen, and an audience watching the images, hearing the sounds, but there is still some distance. Maybe you identify with a certain character, but it’s not like real life, where things just happen to you; there you are in the middle of an event, so you’re not in the best position to judge, you’re emotionally involved. But in cinema, when you watch something, you can compare, you can judge, it’s like a wide-open window to a certain event. I don’t think that the things you discover by this process will change your life, I’m not so optimistic. But I think you can deliver a very precise story about humans in order to allow the audience to assume—to help the audience to assume, at first I help myself to assume something—that we are weak. To accept our weakness and our failures. We do not talk enough about our imperfections, and cinema can confront that. It’s unlike a book, where you can always escape. And it’s such an intimate relationship, because everything is there, in your brain.

I’m very interested in this idea of “realistic” cinema. On the one hand it’s a convention, but I realized something after first discovering Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, and then Bresson, who is…pretty metaphysical. I had a long discussion with a friend who said that Bresson is like Bach, which seemed immediately obvious to me. His films take place very much in the head, even on the level of emotional involvement. At the same time there’s a sort of satisfaction for the brain, something very impressive about the construction, although construction may not be the right word. Bach is impressive, but I’m not moved by his music. Later I discovered Cassavetes and I was really moved. I had to ask myself: I like this, and I like that, but what am I going to do? I knew that from painting already—you fly from one flower to another, there are many temptations. But by following them you ignore the main question: Who the fuck are you? Or, who the fuck am I? After that you have to face a very long line of questions that are not easy to face at all. It forces you to discover a lot of things that are difficult. In cinema, being in the position of someone who is incapable to give an answer, I find a refuge—and I hope not just a refuge, but the truth, although I’m skeptical about it, I hope it’s the truth. I educate myself in order to perceive cinema as a technique of investigating reality. It’s not foremost about the stories, the editing, the image, the space. I’m searching, also in other films, for signs of interest by the author—what is it all about? Not to give answers like the easy ones offered in commercial cinema. And there are other, very important films that bring something to cinema—a new way of conceiving space, time, acting, but at the same time they’re not to the point, not trying to understand, not trying to ask the fundamental questions.

Scope: I guess that brings us to Rohmer, clearly a filmmaker who asks such questions. Lazarescu is the first in a planned cycle of “Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs,” an idea inspired by Rohmer’s cycles. Your style is, of course, very different, but the connection immediately makes sense.

Puiu: Yes, his cinema is all about questions! It’s not about making films in his style, but following his way. I don’t really like this comparison, but if you take, for instance, every artistic current that existed and define it, say, listing the beginnings of the cubist movement, you ignore that Picasso and Braque are so different. And there is this film by Rohmer, L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993). I mean if I had to choose a Rohmer for my top ten it would be Ma nuit chez Maud (1969), but there was something funny, something unique about my experience with Médiathèque, which is a really strange film, shot as if Rohmer didn’t care about the image, or about creating atmosphere. It really opened doors for me. On the one hand you have all this stuff which is very obvious, like the way Fabrice Luchini is playing with the camera, and the end sequence when it turns into a musical. But you also have the scenes with peasants who are living there—which is not fiction, it’s documentary. And it’s all connected by this tree. It’s a really bizarre mixture, and Rohmer is not explaining it, he is asking: What does it mean when all this comes together?

The Death of Mister Lazarescu

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