Life Support

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Directed by Cristi Puiu

Imagine Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead-the last Scorsese film that was any good-remade but without pizazz. That's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. This, too, is the tale of a long night's journey into hell, but it comes from Hungary and points its focus on a 62-year-old widower suffering from varicose veins, an ulcer, a perforated liver and a subdural hematoma. (I can't help it; whenever I hear the medical show cliche "subdural hematoma," I always think of Steve Martin chastizing the very same diagnosis by a child surgical expert in The Man with Two Brains-the best comedy of the '80s-that, among other targets, ridiculed the pomposity of medical jargon.) The Death of Mr. Lazarescu concentrates on the murderous, infuriating bureaucracy of the Romanian state as endured by the patient (played by Ion Fiscuteanu,) and an emergency medical service worker (Luminia Gheorghiu). For two and a half hours we watch impoverished citizen Lazarescu slowly pass away while being pushed around and driven by ambulance from hospital to hospital, examined and clucked over by insensitive or helpless hospital staffers.

Futility seems to be the point of every scene as director/writer Cristi Puiu dramatizes each point in Mr. Lazarescu's stations of the cross. The everyman banality becomes oppressive and obvious. It starts with the lead character's name: Lazarescu Dante Remus. The root word "Lazarus" references the biblical story of Jesus resurrecting the dead, but in this modern setting, no resurrection is possible. "Dante" refers to the Inferno, Dante Alighieri's poetic exposition of damnation. "Remus" evokes the mythological founding of Western civilization and the eventual destruction of brotherhood. No wonder this film has been venerated: It's an ultimate illustration of bad faith taken to the extremes of eschatological negativity.

This is a health care black comedy by a cynic. Puiu seems unconcerned with institutional critique; he revels in misery, the inescapable fecklessness of human behavior. Yet he's a sharp, if glum, filmmaker. Mr. Lazarescu is a memorable figure with stubbly jowls, brows like an owl and searching, mostly unfocussed, blue eyes. This social victim is most pathetic when pandered to by a couple of snooty medical technicians who pull rank on the EMS nurse while bragging about their professional degrees. Imagine a Mike Leigh scene of socialist realism popping out of an episode of television's ER but tending toward the anti-humanist.

Why would anybody overrate this good film by calling it a masterpiece, except to reveal that they haven't been paying attention to what's gone on in film culture? There is, indeed, an Old Left, Hobermanian obsession with anything communist and Eastern European. And this visually unappealing mixture of Romanian folktale and the darkest, Kafkaesque neorealism is right up the alley of the "smart about movies" crowd.

But get a grip. Puiu shows no absurdity that wasn't already dramatized in Lawrence Kasdan's murder film I Love You to Death and no hospital farce not tickled in Blake Edwards' Micki & Maude. (Puiu posits ulcer as metaphor for the human condition.)

Puiu's claim to pitiless art is nullified by the stark compassion of Patrice Chereau's great Son Frère where Eric Gautier's photography gave flesh a tactile dimension. Here, everything blends into pseudo-documentary blandness. Chereau's film was richer, surprising-and blessedly shorter.