Dir. Cristi Puiu, 2006, Romania, 153 mins
Cast: Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminita Gheorghiu, Gabriel Spahiu
Review by Mike Bartlett
It’s Romanian, it’s two and a half hours long and it’s about an elderly man slowly dying over the course of one night. Welcome to what may be the finest film released this year.
Dante Remus Lazarescu is a lonely pensioner living in a grotty flat with two bedraggled-looking cats. Over the course of a lengthy prologue, we catch a taste of his humdrum life, as he argues with his sister on the phone, endures various aches and pains and finally calls on his neighbours for help. A medic is called and the odyssey that ensues is this particular Dante’s own journey through hell, as he is dragged from one overworked hospital to another. There’s been a major traffic accident and the various doctors have no time for a grumbling, alcoholic old sop. It falls to his female Virgil – a concerned ambulancewoman, Mioara, a professional simply trying to do her job – to lead him to his final resting place.
There’s no suspense here. The title flags up the film’s conclusion, and yet it still happens so suddenly, so subtly, that the final shot catches in the mind like a fishbone in the throat. Even now, three months after seeing the picture, I’m still haunted by Lazarescu’s final moments; as the director himself has pointed out, they make you reflect on how the life we see at the bitter end is the one we take with us, as opposed to that built up steadily and intimately over the years. Similarly, the film avoids sentimentality, preserving instead a tone of quietly appalled resignation, offset by a dry humour bizarrely fixated on stress-relieving drugs.
If the set-up sounds like nothing so much as an episode of hospital soap ER, then it’s intriguing to note how this programme was a kind of twisted inspiration. Puiu disagreed with the way the medical staff were represented, believing their work would necessarily make them colder and emotionally distant, and also less driven by a sense of success than one of grinding hard work. Watching this film, you can’t help feeling that it’s not just an insular portrayal of one ex-Communist Bloc country’s health service, but a pretty brutal expose of any system on the brink of collapse; if you want a portrait of the NHS, you’ll find it now at your local arthouse, not in Casualty.
For myself, I saw the film as a meeting of two inspirations, one from the East, one from the West, converging in Romania. From Iran comes the modern Neo-Realist tradition of stories of social responsibility with non-professional and amateur actors (although Ion Fiscuteanu, outstanding in the lead, is apparently a legend in Transylvania.) And from Belgium comes the Dardennes Brothers’ new take on social realism, with strong, stripped-down glimpses of life on the breadline. But it’s important to note that the director has cited other influences - such as the moral tales of Eric Rohmer - and it’s possible to see a Kieslowski-like flirtation with metaphor in Lazarescu. But ultimately, I think it will be the film’s unrelentingly frank observation of the medical system and its patient understanding of all the viewpoints involved which will win the film its admirers.
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