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The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
Mr. Lazarescu is a 62 year old man who phones an ambulance after experiencing headaches and stomach cramps. The film follows his progress as he is taken from one hospital to another, asked the same questions, examined and ignored by doctors and given increasingly serious diagnoses of his condition until, eventually, he dies.
Sounds awful? It isn't.
This Romanian film is not, as the quote from the Guardian on the cover of the dvd would have it, a ‘comic masterpiece’, by any stretch of the imagination. It is rather a searing indictment of the medical profession and humanity at large. Everybody Mr. Lazarescu meets is more occupied by their own concerns than his illness, from the neighbours who don’t want to ruin their Saturday night by going with him to the hospital to the arrogant doctors in one appalling scene who ignore the paramedic’s pleas for them to operate quickly, preferring instead to harangue her for daring to give a medical opinion when it is they who are the doctors.
Filmed almost in real-time, with long takes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the antithesis of flashy medical dramas like E.R. or House. Instead of a race against time to save lives, here a life slips away while time is wasted. By turns fascinating, boring, grim and above all, frustrating, this feels very close to real life on screen, albeit with a deliberate path. The banal conversations of the medical staff ring true. And yet somehow the film itself is anything but ordinary.
The cleverness of the film, for me, was in the way that his trips to various hospitals and conversations with different doctors at first appear to be repetitions – they tell him off for drinking and initially assume that he is only suffering from a hangover – but it gradually becomes clear that Mr. Lazarescu’s journey is a downward spiral. Each time the diagnosis is more serious, time is clearly running out and yet he is getting further away rather than closer to salvation. Mr. Lazarescu himself slowly slips from a spirited and cantankerous, if scruffy, old man, to a weak, confused and frightened patient, to a still corpse, in an excellent performance by Iaon Fiscuteanu.
It is not an easy film to watch, certainly, at times it is quite dull, although you are never in doubt that this is entirely deliberate. It is, however, quite mesmerising. Worth watching, it will stay with you for some time afterwards.
4/5
Mr. Lazarescu is a 62 year old man who phones an ambulance after experiencing headaches and stomach cramps. The film follows his progress as he is taken from one hospital to another, asked the same questions, examined and ignored by doctors and given increasingly serious diagnoses of his condition until, eventually, he dies.
Sounds awful? It isn't.
This Romanian film is not, as the quote from the Guardian on the cover of the dvd would have it, a ‘comic masterpiece’, by any stretch of the imagination. It is rather a searing indictment of the medical profession and humanity at large. Everybody Mr. Lazarescu meets is more occupied by their own concerns than his illness, from the neighbours who don’t want to ruin their Saturday night by going with him to the hospital to the arrogant doctors in one appalling scene who ignore the paramedic’s pleas for them to operate quickly, preferring instead to harangue her for daring to give a medical opinion when it is they who are the doctors.
Filmed almost in real-time, with long takes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the antithesis of flashy medical dramas like E.R. or House. Instead of a race against time to save lives, here a life slips away while time is wasted. By turns fascinating, boring, grim and above all, frustrating, this feels very close to real life on screen, albeit with a deliberate path. The banal conversations of the medical staff ring true. And yet somehow the film itself is anything but ordinary.
The cleverness of the film, for me, was in the way that his trips to various hospitals and conversations with different doctors at first appear to be repetitions – they tell him off for drinking and initially assume that he is only suffering from a hangover – but it gradually becomes clear that Mr. Lazarescu’s journey is a downward spiral. Each time the diagnosis is more serious, time is clearly running out and yet he is getting further away rather than closer to salvation. Mr. Lazarescu himself slowly slips from a spirited and cantankerous, if scruffy, old man, to a weak, confused and frightened patient, to a still corpse, in an excellent performance by Iaon Fiscuteanu.
It is not an easy film to watch, certainly, at times it is quite dull, although you are never in doubt that this is entirely deliberate. It is, however, quite mesmerising. Worth watching, it will stay with you for some time afterwards.
4/5