REVIEWED - THE DEATH OF MR LAZARESCU: IN 1972 Luis Buñuel's sublime surrealist comedy, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, followed six characters in search of a meal who are frustrated at every turn. A year earlier, Arthur Hiller's The Hospital, based on an abrasive screenplay by Paddy Chayevsky, presented a scathing picture of the US health system.
Now a new Romanian film, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, evokes both of those stinging satires as it follows an ailing man shuttled from one hospital to another on a busy Saturday night in Bucharest.
We become familiar with his full name, Dante Remus Lazarescu, as he has to give it time after time in hospital after hospital until he is barely able to speak. Played by Ion Fiscuteanu, he is a lonely 62-year-old widower living with his three cats in a cramped, unkempt apartment. Suffering from headaches and stomach pains, and with a history of ulcers, he phones for an ambulance.
"An ambulance on a Saturday?" remarks a cynical neighbour, and this proves to be no ordinary Saturday night when a bus crash stretches the city's medical services to their limits. The only glimmer of hope is the dedicated paramedic (Luminta Gheorghiu) who takes on the onerous task of getting him into a hospital to see a specialist.
While Lazarescu appreciates her unstinting efforts, this Good Samaritan gets nothing but abuse from the doctors she encounters. One accuses her of not showing enough respect for his profession, and another is particularly sarcastic, calling Lazarescu a pig while lecturing him about his drinking.
Romanian writer-director Cristi Puiu, a self-confessed hypochondriac, extracts rich humour from this bleak scenario before his black comedy turns progressively darker, as the paramedic and her ailing patient are faced with bureaucracy and indifference at every turn.
The film depicts the city's health system as on the verge of collapse, as are some of the doctors in their exhaustion at the end of what one describes as "another night of junkies, drunks and the traumatised". It is notable that they can manage without leaving patients on trolleys for hours on end, but that doesn't detract from the sheer despair the experience engenders.
As the patient passively undergoing this experience, Fiscuteanu is gamely put through the mill, and Puiu surrounds him with fine actors in a nimbly paced film that never sags throughout its two and a half hours. As it reflects on human frailty and mortality, the film is shaped as an unsentimental humanist tale where inhumanity is found where it should be least expected.
