Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

[ejp626]

I just saw The Death of Mr. Lazarescu at the Cambridge Film Fest. The basic plot is that an older man in Bucharest feels ill and calls for the ambulance. His sickness is largely discounted by medical technicians, since he is clearly an alcoholic. The movie follows him as he is shuttled from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital (this is largely due to a major traffic accident sending dozens of people to hospitals at the same time). It's still making the rounds of Film Festivals and hasn't had a general release in the US or UK. Probably won't be widely released in the US, even though it won at Cannes and elsewhere.

The critics are just falling over themselves to praise this film. But I just can't see general audiences falling for this, since it is so bleak. (Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, which I enjoyed a lot, covers the same territory and is similarly fairly dark, but even that film has a more optimistic sense of redemption by the end. I don't think BOTD did that well in the US, but I may be wrong.) I think Ebert's review is quite good, as are some others: Ebert review; NYFF review. In fact, Ebert's recent review was what pushed me to see the film when I had the chance. How terribly ironic that he was just back in the hospital himself last week.

It was even longer than I had thought - 150 minutes in almost real time (they cut out most of the scenes of the ambulance driving on the road, but otherwise it was real time watching the guy get shuttled from one doctor to another and the waiting in the hospital corridors, etc.). It is one of the more depressing, but realistic movies I have seen in a while, not terribly life-affirming at all. I think this is a valuable corrective to Hollywood movies, but it can be a bit much. I could have probably done with 90 minutes.

The guy is complaining throughout the whole movie about headaches and stomache pains, and I ended up with a splitting headache myself. What I did like about the movie was watching the whole range of doctors interacting with Lazarescu and the nurse who rides with him in the ambulance. Most blame him for his fate (he should not drink) but most do their job and a few doctors are reasonably nice/patient with him. However, there is one very arrogant pair of doctors who decide to send Lazarescu away to the next hospital, mostly because it is late and the nurse rubs them the wrong way. On the whole, nurses seem to respond better to the situation than the doctors, but again, that is a simplification. There are many messages that come across in this film, and one is that people simply respond differently to the many stresses of being a doctor in a medical system under great pressure (Bucharest). Most just kind of cope and are a bit snappish (I certainly relate to that), some are still relatively engaged and even kind and would be great doctors in a better health care system, and a few are terrible. This is much closer to reality, even in the US, than ER or Scrubs or certainly House.

I probably wouldn't watch the film a second time, unless the other five movies about life in Bucharest are made (according to the film publicity "the film is the first in Puiu's series, Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs, inspired by Rohmer's Six Moral Tales"), though I personally see greater ties with Kieslowski's Decalog, certainly in terms of tone.

Edited July 8, 2006 by ejp626

[Van Basten II]

Just watched it on DVD. I enjoyed the universality of the movie. The story was done in Romania but could have been done in Canada or many other industrialized countries.

Basically it is the story of a guy who doesn't know it but is gravely ill and instead of having a system where people who care for the patient and the sick, we have a series of vignettes where everybody fails him because the because they prefer moralizing him, they have other emergencies, they're stuck in bureaucracy, or they rather play power games with their subbordinates. The scene in the hospital where the people refuse to operate him is as cold and cynical as it gets.

I think this film should be required viewing for anybody who works in hospitals. Not because i think people work that way, it remains a movie after all. But because it reminds us that we're talking about a business about human beings and in the grand scale of things it seems to get lost for the profit of more petty affairs.

[Adam]

I saw that it will be playing at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles for 4 days in early May - on the smaller screen, for those in Los Angeles. I'm looking forward to it.