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Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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He asks his neighbors for some pills, and they finally call and manage to get a medic and a driver to show up. But for Mr. Lazarescu, the journey through the circles of hell, represented here by the Bucharest medical services, is only beginning.

For one thing, Lazarescu picked a bad night to get sick. There’s been a bus accident and the emergency rooms are crowded. Lazarescu will be transferred to four different hospitals before his suffering is over—and he dies.

Puiu is not interested much in giving us too many details about Lazarescu as a character. He drinks a little. He lives with cats. His apartment is a mess. He has a daughter somewhere in Canada, and a sister on the outskirts of Bucharest. After two and a half hours, we don’t really know much more than this.

Instead of character, Piui’s focus is on capturing the temperature of the human condition as it circles around the dying Lazarescu. Doctors and medics diagnose what’s wrong with Lazarescu anecdotally, on the fly. They are more interested in banter, in flirting with each other, in that medical-circle small talk which anyone who has visited a hospital knows well, and which is surprising because it has so little to do with patients, medicine or curing anyone of anything. Obviously, Puiu and his co-screenwriter, Razvan Radulescu, have done their homework and observed well.

Much of the interaction with Lazarescu from the medical staff he encounters is arrogant. They are tired, overworked, and impatient. He is “seen” by a small army of doctors, and is subjected to patronizing comments from most.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is as if “ER,” the TV show, was directed by Frederick Wiseman. Puiu credits the work of Jim Jarmusch, Cassavetes, and Eric Rohmer as his influences. But he contrasts his approach to filming medicine in action from “ER” by saying, “When you watch the American TV series, there’s movement in every direction, the choreography of the characters is amazing…In my country, doctors and everyone else live in slow motion, as if they were on valium, and still had 500 years to live.”

There is a lot of humor in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and there is a hopeful thread. The medic, Mioara, who comes to pick him up from the apartment, accompanies Lazarescu on his journey through the Romanian medical system. As we watch Lazarescu’s physical condition gradually fail, she emerges as someone who defends him and fights for him, becomes a buffer and an advocate against the over-stressed and disconnected medical staff.

Puiu sees love as the central theme of his film: “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” He says, “It is a movie about love, but also a movie in which love does not exist.” In reaching and articulating a universal theme. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu reaches far beyond the emergency rooms of Bucharest, to the central question of one individual’s capacity and ability to commit to another.

 This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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