Just for a bit of context, here's the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's one and one-half star
It attempts to comment on the failings of the Romanian medical system and a post-socialist society where people talk "at" instead of "to" each other. It's the first of a planned six-part series on Bucharest, and we're sure the story of the unnecessary death of a lonely, smelly old alcoholic could have helped to shed light on the social issue. But in any language, there's something to be said for effective storytelling, and this isn't it.
If you've seen the film, then I hope that dismissal sounds as baseless to you as it does to me. If you haven't seen the film, then I hope you either don't read that paragraph or that it doesn't color your perception of the film. I'm certain that not one word of it is insightful.
I think that Lazarescu is a really well-written film. That seems to me like a strange thing to say first, given that the characters in the film aren't terribly talkative and the narrative is comprised of just a few extended scenes taking place initially at the title character's apartment and then at the three hospitals where treatment for him is sought, with several lengthy ambulance rides connecting the four locations. And yet it is exceedingly well-written, and I have to think that the film's unique power is built foremost on the strength of its script.
Lazarescu-- the lonely, smelly old alcoholic-- is a retired engineer who lives in a shabby apartment in a Bucharest high-rise. He's a widower with a daughter living in Canada and a sister within a day's travel. He has more than one cat living with him, and he frequently takes furtive drinks of some potent-looking homebrew. When he is taken ill with inexplicable pain one day, he has no one to turn to but the neighbors, who know him well enough if not intimately. The neighbors manage to get an ambulance to come quicker than it normally would, and Lazarescu is carried off from one hospital to the next.
Turning to the capsule quoted above, is there some sort of intellectual gag reflex hardwired into critics whereby any film or book taking place in a former Eastern Bloc country is automatically transformed into some meditation on the failings of the socialist state? I wouldn't think of denying that such films and books will necessarily bear the imprint of life under such goverments, but to presume that a film about a man who gets sick in Romania can't simply be about a man who gets sick in Romania seems to me to deny the character an essential humanity that we wouldn't be so quick to impose upon our own films or characters. I'll readily agree that this film doesn't do anything to "shed light on the social issue," but would add that the filmmaker couldn't really care less about that in the context of Lazarescu's journey, and the film is the better for it.
And if it wasn't enough that the film is expected to expose the sordid underbelly of socialized medicine, it's also being showcased as a conversation-starter on the subject of the failings of American health care. My friend Doug pointed out to me that the Region 1 DVD release of Lazarescu contains an extra feature entitled, ominously, "A Perspective on the U.S. Healthcare System." Oh, that will make this a must-rent title for people browsing in Blockbuster.
Why is it that a movie about a man going to the hospital is burdened with a lot of baggage that a movie about a man going to see his lawyer or a movie about a man spending time in his garden wouldn't be so burdened? I suppose it's because a significant portion of our perceptions of social progress depend on the idea that medical science, in theory and practice, is exact and trustworthy. We trust doctors, their training, their elaborate machines and their terribly expensive medicines to find what is wrong with us and to fix it, and the idea that there is still some whim or uncertainty or variation to the act of healing goes against our comfort and our willingness to devote such a large portion of gross domestic product to medicine.
Apart from the health care perfectability delusion, there is another large entry barrier that American audiences must overcome to appreciate Lazarescu. It has a point of view that is as different as can be from the typical hospital drama. All of the hospital shows that run perpetually on American television over the past dozen years are doctor-centered. The stories are told from the perspective of the medical staff, and we see them go about their days as patients dutifully enter and exit the screen. The doctors and nurses are the ongoing characters, and their personal and professional conflicts are the central drama of the show. The patients in ER or Scrubs are merely dramatic foils or props who provide moments of levity or induce some insight upon the doctor. The patient's role in the drama ends a moment before the episode does, when they are no longer needed to act as the object of attention of the highly-skilled but personally-tortured medical professionals. Once they have led the doctor to furrow his or her brow and consider something in a new light, they have served their purpose.
So when Lazarescu spends a collective hour in three hospitals with the doctors and nurses acting upon Lazarescu but remaining largely in the background in relation to the unconscious man on the gurney, there's a moment of dramatic disorientation. Hey, the doctors are supposed to swoop in and fix his problems with a torrent of jargon and surgical genius! What's worse, Puiu makes Lazarescu's experience (and ours as viewer) look a lot more like what we are accustomed to encountering at a hospital. We sit and wait, or stand and wait. We look at the others in line ahead of us and gauge their apparent maladies in comparison to what we perceive our own to be. We become bored and frustrated and wish to return to the life lived outside that place.
Assuming that all of those obstructions can be overcome, Lazarescu is an invitation to empathize with a man in the hours of his apparent death. Lazarescu doesn't say much after the first few minutes of the film. He feels ill, speaks to the ambulance dispatcher and his neighbor about his illness, calls his sister to tell her he is sick, speaks to the EMT who accompanies him throughout the film about his pain and then loses consciousness for most of the remainder of the film, with only a few moments where he is lucid or responsive after the halfway mark. For most of the film he is a passive human centerpiece carted from hospital to hospital or sitting in one hallway or anteroom or another. He is acted upon rather than acting himself, and spoken to rather than speaking.
Empathizing with Lazarescu is apparently a difficult thing to do, judging by the reactions to Lazarescu. He smells of alcohol, which gives rise to the one constant throughout the film: people ask Lazarescu if he is drunk, or wonder aloud (whether he's awake or not) whether his illness is the result of alcohol. When one's unconscious and smelling of alcohol, the latter must have caused the former, right? And so, doctors and nurses and capsule writers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and viewers like you and I assume that we're being compelled to deal with or watch this sick old man because he has drunken himself into a stupor. At some point in his unconsciousness, he loses control of his bowels, and by fouling himself draws even less sympathetic attention from the hospital personnel. It's an interesting challenge; in the face of the scowls and insults, can we continue to regard Lazarescu as a human being with dignity in spite of his incapacitation, his smelling of alcohol and being covered in excrement? If so, then there is something close to a cathartic release when, at the film's end, a nurse preparing him for surgery shaves his head and then tenderly calls him handsome. It's a beautiful moment, all the more so because Lazarescu has been so much denigrated.
Of course, it would not be fair to say that Lazarescu receives only poor treatment. The EMT who picks him up and stays with him throughout the film is uncommonly kind. Lazarescu spends an inordinate amount of time waiting to be treated, but at one point he is jumped to the head of a CAT scan line because he's held out as someone's uncle. The outright refusal of the medical staff at one hospital to treat him is galling, though it leads to an absurd discussion of consent that's very well-done. The staff at the third hospital, where he is finally treated, is as solicitous and professional as any of us could hope to have.
By his first name, Dante Remus Lazarescu points to The Divine Comedy and its own three-stop journey. By his last name, Lazarescu points to those two New Testament characters, the brother of Martha and Mary who died and was raised by Jesus and the poor man who was despised in his lifetime but sat at Abraham's side in the hereafter. It's those New Testament allusions that really fascinate me: can we, as viewers, see this unspeaking sick man with the same eyes that his Creator does?
