Reviews

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

(Directed by Christy Puiu)

Sanda Miller

This film is not about the death of Mr. Lazarescu; we do not even see him dying. This film is about the everyday in post-communist Romania and Mr. Lazarescu becomes paradigmatic of how life is shaping up in the aftermath of the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu's totalitarian communist regime in l989.

The narrative is simple: Mr. Lazarescu, an older man, lives with his two cats in a sordid looking council flat somewhere at the outskirts of Bucharest. He is ill. We see him dressed in shabby trousers, tea-shirt, slippers and wearing a woollen cap feeding his cat. After finishing his task he sits down on the only existing chair by a small table on which there is an old fashioned telephone and a litre bottle which is half empty, without any label. He picks up the receiver and dials a number: it is that of his sister who lives in another town and from what he is saying we glean not only that this is an unhappy relationship but that he is supporting her financially by sending her most of his pension on a regular basis. They row about what appears to be money and finally he pledges to send her his whole pension, no doubt to placate her. He mentions also that his health has been deteriorating but there seemed to be no reaction to what his sister clearly considered of no immediate interest to her. He puts the phone down and clearly in great pain takes a slug from the bottle which he promptly vomits, and which we later learn was some sort of home made alcoholic beverage, no doubt deadly and at that point he decides to knock at his neighbours door across the narrow corridor to ask for a painkiller T.

Thus we meet the first protagonists of the gallery of people that populate the subsequent events in Mr. Lazarescu's life: a middle aged and very fat couple. From the way they are dressed and speak it is immediately clear that they are working-class with a very rudimentary education: very likely factory workers. They open the door but only just without welcoming or inviting their neighbour in. After listening to his request for a painkiller because he had just run out of his, they recommend a brand different from the one Mr. Lazarescu was accustomed to and an animated and somewhat surreal dialogue ensues about the merits or lack thereof of the obscure Romanian brands of painkillers under discussion. About to faint, Mr. Lazarescu is helped back into his flat and in bed by the concerned couple; they phone for an ambulance, which arrives quite quickly. The nurse who examines him decides that his condition is serious enough to warrant hospitalisation.

A veritable odyssey begins which lasts the whole night, whereby Mr. Lazarescu being is shunted from hospital to hospital for medical assistance. Although various tests are being recommended and undertaken in the various hospitals where the ambulance takes him, the seriousness of his condition seemed to act as a deterrent because nobody wants to undertake the risk to operate. We are not even sure what the problem is; in some instances it is assumed that he has a brain tumour; in others that his liver is damaged, whilst the ambulance nurse diagnosed - to the annoyance of the doctors to whom she had the 'impertinence' of voicing her suspicion - that it was cancer of the colon. One of the young doctors - probably the most humane of the lot, of the grim lot - gum chewing and joking, took the trouble to give him a scan in order to check up the 'etage' and 'parter', e.g., the brain and liver, he referred to as 'pate'. Mr. Lazarescu was a lost case and no doctor was prepared to give up time and energy to assist him. Moreover as he had drank the deadly alcoholic potion to alleviate the pain before the ambulance arrived, it was unanimously decided that he was drank rather than delirious.

Throughout the night the ambulance continued its solitary journey through the badly lit streets of Bucharest whilst Mr. Lazarescu was gradually loosing consciousness and the nurse and the driver were becoming increasingly overcome by a sense of hopelessness in their quest to assist the poor man, not helped by the stench of vomit, urine and faeces emanating from his body contorted by pain on the primitive stretcher at the back of the ambulance.

Finally the last port of call in the early hours of the morning: another hospital. By that time Mr. Lazarescu has (mercifully) lost unconscious and was in no position to sign any papers authorising the risky chirurgical intervention needed to give him even the slightest chance of survival. It was too late and as we watch the two nurses stripping him naked and throwing his soiled old clothes in an incinerator in order to prepare him for the operation: they wash his bloated body stretched on the white sheets of the hospital bed distorted by the bad diet and alcoholism with sponges they dip in a metal basin filled with water; then they progress to his head in order to shave his hair and then onto his face … the slow movements of the two, middle aged nurses, no doubt exhausted after the night shift become tender, caring and their humanity elevates their prosaic activity to a ritualistic mystery: for the death of Mr. Lazarescu.

During the course of events leading from the beginning of the film when we see Mr. Lazarescu in the cramped flat feeding his cat to the final scene when he is cleaned up for the operation table, we are introduced to a gallery of people with varying degrees of significance in his life starting from his sister and her family who do not appear in the film but whose importance in Mr. Lazarescu's life is implied through their telephone conversation to the elusive existence of a daughter who lived in Canada. His neighbours, a middle-aged couple are showing him kindness when he knocks at their door across the narrow passage, which separates their flats to ask for a painkiller. We see him taking a mouthful of liquid from a bottle which turns out to be some deadly home made alcoholic potion and although he vomits it in the next instance the smell lingers on his breath is sufficiently strong to convince everybody that he was inebriated. As he was barely able to stand, they helped him back to his flat and into bed showering him with a torrent of inane comments about his 'wicked' ways and the benefits of the particular brand of painkillers they were about to administer him over all the others. Not able to keep down the pills Mr. Lazarescu vomits them and at that point the couple decided to phone for an ambulance. After some time they arrived. The nurse decided, rightly as it turned out, that Mr. Lazarescu was gravely ill and took it upon herself to take him to an emergency unit of a hospital and at this point his night ordeal which end during the next morning begins.

The hospitals are much the same; hectic, busy full of doctors, nurses and patients with or without their families, much like the plethora of television films about hospitals we are fed with on a regular basis in this country. The doctors flirt with the nurses, the nurses discuss their sex lives, the latest new outfit or social engagement with that air of professional detachment that enables them to block out all the human pain, misery and physical and mental degradation they are confronted with on a regular basis in their profession. Mr. Lazarescu becomes yet another nameless patient without a history. We know that his sister living in another town is on her way to Bucharest and will be arriving first thing the next morning; we also know that he has a daughter somewhere in Canada and two cats with which he shares his miserable flat … but not much else about the sixty odd years of life on this earth and the reasons which contributed to his sorry state of health.

What we do learn however about the way he is treated by the system is important because it reveals the sorry state not only of Romania's national health but that of the whole country in the aftermath of the Ceausescu regime; in this way the film serves as an important, critical metaphor for Romanian society.

What we learn is that this is a country in the throws of establishing a new identity dominated by Western principles, which saw an abrupt transition from the Communist command to the free market economy of the capitalist system with disastrous consequences. The lack of economic prospects, poverty and corruption lead to moral corruption and in the case of an ordinary person such as Mr. Lazarescu physical degradation. It is perhaps touching though that until the very last minutes before he lost consciousness altogether, he was trying to keep his human dignity intact by remonstrating with the doctors with regard to the cause of his illness which was not alcoholism. To one doctor he said that miserable creatures such as him are inconsequential and therefore with no hope of recovery. His personal way out though was to preserve his humanity, what was left of it, to the very end … and at the very end when we see his poor deformed body ritually prepared not for an operation to save him but for death, he is being cleansed of everything earthly, purified and ready to confront the ultimate rite of passage with his dignity restored; ultimately a life enhancing message this bleak and thought provoking film is offering.