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primul film romanesc pe marile ecrane in America.... restecpa!
New Yorker:

In the heartrending Romanian film “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the hero—known in full as Dante Remus Lazarescu—is an unregenerate but oddly lovable mess. A retired engineer who lives in Bucharest, Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) regularly drinks something called Mastropol—home-brewed alcohol that looks like liquid wood soap. His wife is dead, and he is estranged from his daughter and his sister; he lives with three smelly cats that he loves. Lazarescu is sixty-two, a tough old guy (in Bucharest, sixty-two is elderly) with a heavy chest and thick arms. By temperament, he’s independent to the point of crankiness, and sardonic in a remorseless way that suggests many campaigns and few victories. At the beginning of the film, his head is splitting, and he’s sick to his stomach. Lazarescu is largely the creator of his own problems. What is he to us? That taunting question is part of the dramatic material that Cristi Puiu, the director, who wrote the movie with Razvan Radulesco, has built into “Mr. Lazarescu.” What are the bonds—if any—that hold strangers to a dying man, especially a dying alcoholic who’s a pain in the neck?

Cristi Puiu, who is thirty-nine and has made just one other feature film, doesn’t like to rush. As he records the mood and the flow of people at work, he holds the camera at medium distance, avoiding obvious closeups, and by the end we feel that we have understood something about Romanians, about hospitals, and about dying. This understanding is the product of a special kind of irony: we know that a movie is an artifice, lasting around two hours, in which something happens; we know that Lazarescu will die. But the characters don’t know these things. They feel little of the alarm that we feel, and we want to reach into the frame and shake them by the shoulders.

A tired nurse, Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu), arrives at Lazarescu’s apartment with an ambulance. She feels lousy herself, but, as the night goes on, she is stirred by her patient’s helplessness, and she becomes his advocate and protector. She’s only a nurse, however, and the doctors brush her aside. It’s a tough night in Bucharest (there’s been a bad bus accident), and they’re annoyed by this drunk with too many problems. They lord it over him and make multiple and confusing diagnoses, rather than taking responsibility for his treatment. Like some awkward, undeliverable package, Lazarescu gets shunted from hospital to hospital, from specialist to specialist, each more callous and vain than the last. An acrid kind of black comedy develops that has its roots, I suspect, both in twentieth-century Eastern European literature and in the long experience of dithering Communist bureaucracy. The doctors gossip, make jokes, and trade favors. (After seeing this movie, you may think better of the American threat of malpractice suits.) As they waste time, Lazarescu lapses into semi-poetic incoherence, like Lear’s fool. The doctors’ inhuman nonsense is mocked by Lazarescu’s all-too-human nonsense as he tries to hold on to some fragment of memory and desire.

It would be a mistake, I think, to read this movie as simply a satire on Romanian medicine and the lethargy of the Romanian character. Lazarescu is just a lonely man who’s going down, but we want at least a moment of recognition that a life is ending. As we watch Lazarescu’s rudely tendered drift toward extinction, our response shifts from disgust to sympathy, from bleak amusement to something like solidarity and love. Laid out, “a poor bare, forked animal,” as Lear describes himself, Lazarescu is our representative as he enters that final night. “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” for all its terrible matter-of-factness, produces tumultuous feelings of amazement and revolt.

by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2006-05-01
Posted 2006-04-24