The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)

Very Cool!!!

Excellent but underrated film

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It was the most impressing movie i've seen in a really long time. I almost have no words to describe it. Inspired from hypochondria that has hunted him for years, and the medical system in Romania, Cristi Puiu directs a very realistic masterpiece. You, the viewer are practically the third person in the movie. After a while you feel like you are there, in the action, and it's nothing you can do to help Mr. Lazarescu. The actors are doing as well,a very good job. Excellent actors like Florin Zamfirescu, Ion Fiscuteanu, are simply amazing. They portrait perfectly the east-European way of being.The movie it's genius, and deeply moving. I recommend it with my entire heart.

I just saw this one yesterday evening on TV and I am still under its influence. I also read some of the comments and it is obvious that you guys in the West do not have the slightest clue as to what it is like in the post-communist countries despite 18-19 years of "freedom". The film has personally struck me because hospitals are pretty much the same in Hungary and so are the members of staff. Cynical doctors, exhausted nurses, underpaid assistants all around waiting for your money to be slipped in their pockets in the prerequisite envelope. I escorted both my father (Mr. Lazarescu even resembled him) and my mother in many hospitals here in Budapest, Hungary and had exactly the same impressions here. Of course, this is not a piece of entertainment in the strictest sense but I have never seen such a hyperrealistic film before. I could totally identify myself with the characters and the environment seemed so sadly familiar. I cannot but give it a straight 10 out of 10.

Other comments cover the story well, so I'll focus on the documentary aspect of this complex film - not complex in story but complex in idea.On the positive side: it is quite remarkable film-making to create an acted film which feels "real" most of the time and as if one is watching a cinema verite documentary on one man's trip through the health care system. The film feels closest to Frederick Wiseman's brilliant (and 6-hour long) documentary "Near Death," with a few transfusions from another medical documentary of his, "Hospital." Why not just do a straight documentary? Acting a scripted story enables the filmmaker (who says in an interview that he admires Wiseman) to make more concise points (with some stereotypical character portrayals) about the way people access an overburdened health care system, how disreputable patients are treated by medical personnel (in the US, GOMER's - "Get Out of My Emergency Room"), and about the human tragedy of dying alone in fear and pain (which happens quite often in the US - see the "SUPPORT" study of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). In its realism in depicting these features of health care with actors and a script, and somewhat unsteady hand-held camera with long takes, "Lazarescu" is quite an achievement in cinema.On the negative side: It is not and IMHO should not be an enjoyable film to watch, though I found it absorbing in the same way that Wiseman's films are absorbing (no accident, I assume). I am utterly baffled by the quotes on the DVD box: "hilarious" . . . "acclaimed comedy" or the subtitle "a black comedy with serious side effects." Baloney. I found absolutely nothing funny about this film, unless one considers modern industrial health care systems as a whole a kind of black comedy or bad joke. Perhaps my reaction is because I'm a medical sociologist with expertise on documentary film portrayal of dying and death (really!), and have seen and analyzed the majority of actual documentaries on the subject (close to 100). This film is quite realistic about most aspects of health care that it weighs in on (whether in Romania OR the U.S.), presumably by the director's intent. I could have shown it to one of my classes as a "documentary" and few would have been the wiser, quite a compliment to the director.Perhaps after seeing this film we might be moved to demand better health care, more medical resources, or more compassion toward sick old men dying alone in pain in the middle of the night, but a "comedy"? To see what's here as a comedy is to lose a part of our humanity.

For anyone who has made a trip to or has accompanied a loved one to the emergency room, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" may be too realistic to bear.A few years ago, my family called the ambulance for one of our relatives. He was having vague back pain -- we couldn't get him to communicate with us about it. He didn't want to go to the hospital, but his pain was too great for him not to. He is an alcoholic, and to this day lives under the assumption that none of us know he's an alcoholic, so I think his fear of the hospital had somewhat to do with the fear that his "secret" would be exposed. We ended up in a living hell of smug doctors, each with a different diagnosis of his condition, but who were all in agreement that the patient should be treated like dirt because of his addiction. If he wasn't going to care about his own health, they seemed to think, then why should they? So needless to say, despite the fact that it takes place in Romania, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" hit frightfully close to home for me, as it's about a lonely, alcoholic man and his nighttime trip into the purgatory of emergency-room bureaucracy. The foreign setting aside, this film could have taken place in the USA and been no different. Nobody has time for Mr. Lazarescu, everyone has a different theory as to what is wrong with him, the nurses are more interested in making sure paperwork is filled out than they are in taking care of the living, breathing human being suffering -- and perhaps dying -- on the stretcher in front of them. In one scene, the doctors insult and belittle the ambulance nurse when she tries to offer her own assessment of Mr. Lazarescu's condition, holding their advanced schooling over and against her. We don't learn much about Mr. Lazarescu, and so we see events occur from the perspective of this paramedic who takes charge of him and carts him from one hospital to the next in a desperate attempt to find one that will treat him. To her, Mr. Lazarescu is a job, yet she's the closest thing to a caring relative he has, so cold and indifferent is the rest of the health care world.This film is astonishing in its meticulous detail, and it's hard to believe it's not a documentary, something out of the world of Fredrick Wiseman. Most scenes are filmed in long takes, the camera standing back at an objective distance simply capturing the whirl of human activity taking place around it. The acting is amazing, for the very reason that no one seems to be acting. It's a deeply unsettling film; we know Mr. Lazarescu will likely die -- from cancer if not from the surgery he's about to undergo when the film closes, and anyway, the title tells us as much. But we don't see him die in the film -- the last scene is of him being washed, shaved and dressed for surgery, a human being reduced to a slab of living flesh on a table, robbed of even his last shred of dignity, while no one appears to care. Somehow, that lack of closure is one of the most unsettling things in the film; it captures the feeling one has when you've finally gotten your loved one to the hospital and all you can do is wait, not sure whether or not you're going to see him alive again.Grade: A