The Death of Mister Lazarescu

The 63-year-old widower and alcoholic Dante Remus Lazarescu is already burdened by his name, but it is the stunning failure and dehumanising Romanian health care system that really ends up putting him into Dante's inferno. Lazarescu, who lives alone with his three cats, calls an ambulance just in case when he feels unwell one evening. What follows is a tragic journey lasting hours to hospitals filled with overtired and incapable doctors and wrong diagnoses, while life ebbs away from the man as he becomes more and more ill. Inspired by filmmakers including Depardon, Cassavetes and Rohmer, Puiu masterfully tackles a hyper-realistic story in which the camera only seems to observe in real-time, while the film maintains a certain light-heartedness and irony. It looks like a documentary, but in reality every minute, every sentence and every shot is directed. The director does not choose to provide detailed character studies of his protagonist, but films him in tragic circumstances and claustrophobic spaces. Puiu manages to make the drama transcend the personal level in his second feature and questions mercilessly - but not bitterly - the far reaching consequences of medical bureaucracy and inefficiency. His work has been compared with that of film makers like Mike Leigh and Frederick Wiseman. The Death of Mister Lazarescu is the first film from the series Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs that Puiu wants to make, inspired by Rohmer's Six Moral Stories. (SdH)