Review of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) by J H — 12 May 2006

Dante Remus Lazarescu is a 62-year-old widower who lives in a dirty apartment in Bucharest with his three cats. He hasn't been feeling well for several days. He has a terrible headache and he's been throwing up since morning. He's been taking all varieties of pills to try to ease his discomfort, in addition to drinking quite a bit of strong homemade liquor. Not long after the film begins, Lazarescu realizes something is very wrong and calls for an ambulance. While he's waiting, he knocks on the door of his neighbors, a middle-aged couple, to see if they might have any pain pills they'd be willing to share with him.

Lazarescu reeks of booze so his neighbors insist that his headache and vomiting is due to over-consumption of alcohol. They help him back to his apartment, instruct him to lie down, and give him a pill for nausea which Lazarescu promptly throws up. The neighbor notices "threads of blood" in the vomit so he thinks perhaps Lazarescu is sick after all. He instructs his wife to also call for an ambulance also in the hopes of maybe speeding them up. Apparently emergency services are not especially prompt on weekends in Bucharest and poor Lazarescu had the misfortune of getting sick on a Saturday.

Eventually a nurse arrives to examine Lazarescu. At first she too dismisses his problem as being too much alcohol but after she pokes him in the belly and he screams, she realizes something else may be wrong. Her guess is colon cancer but Lazarescu insists the problem is related to a long ago ulcer operation. In any event, she decides he's sick enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. Lazarescu's nearest relative, a sister, can't make it to Bucharest til morning, and the neighbors choose not to accompany him, so Lazarescu is on is own. He asks the neighbors to look after his cats in case he hospital keeps him and with that, he, the nurse, and the ambulance driver are on their way.

When they arrive at the hospital, they discover that a major bus accident has flooded the emergency room with patients. A very gruff doctor briefly examines Lazarescu, chastising him the entire time for being a drunk who takes no care of his own body and then expects the doctors to fix him. He concludes that Lazarescu's liver is enormous and he needs a CT scan but since his own hospital is so busy, he instructs the nurse to take him somewhere else.

So Lazarescu is loaded back into the ambulance and off they go to another hospital. When Lazarescu continues to complain about his terrible headache, he's finally examined by a neurosurgeon who concludes that he needs emergency brain surgery. Unfortunately, that hospital's operating rooms are both tied up til morning so he sends Lazarescu on to a third hospital.

The third hospital isn't nearly so busy and Lazarescu is able to be examined promptly. But the doctors here are such pompous egomaniacs that they refuse to listen to the nurse when she repeats the neurosurgeon's opinion that brain surgery is urgently needed. By this point it's 3 a.m. [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] five hours after the ambulance first picked up Lazarescu [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] and his condition is deteriorating rapidly. Whereas he began the night sick but still full of life [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] insisting on sitting rather than lying down in the back of the ambulance and arguing with the doctors who blamed his illness on drinking [color=black][font=Tahoma]? [/font][/color]now he's incontinent and babbling incoherently. When a clearly confused Lazarescu refuses to sign the surgery consent form [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] he can't even hold the pen [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] the doctor cruelly suggests that the nurse drive Lazarescu around in the ambulance until he's comatose and consent is no longer needed. Otherwise he won't operate.

Instead, the nurse opts to take Lazarescu to yet a fourth hospital. Its emergency room isn't busy and there's even a compassionate doctor on duty. It looks like Lazarescu's ordeal [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] and ours [color=black][font=Tahoma]?[/font][/color] might finally be over.

[i]The Death of Mr. Lazarescu[/i] is not an easy film to watch. It's a grueling two and a half hours long but it seemed much longer to me. I was surprised to walk out of the theatre and see that it was still somewhat bright out and that Lazarescu's nightmare world wasn't really real.

It's hard to give this film a rating. The film was so well done and well-acted that I got completely caught up in it and forget for a while that Lazarescu and friends weren't actual people. As he's driven from hospital to hospital getting sicker with each passing hour, [i]his[/i] hellish trip felt like [i]my[/i] hellish trip. How does one rate a very well-executed trip to hell?

My other problem with this film is more of a personal quirk. Though I'm fine with blood and needles and fingers popped out of joint, I really don't handle illness well. I once had to put my head between my knees to keep from passing out after reading an article about Rocky Mountain spotted fever on the train. Now I know better. I skip stories about diseases and cover my ears and say "la la la" if people insist on regaling me with the details of their recent appendicitis attacks. So for me, the early scenes of a blood-thread barfing Lazarescu filmed with a shaky hand-held camera were almost too much to bear; I started feeling light-headed and recognized the possibility that I might also throw up. Fortunately, the outward manifestations of Lazarescu's illness abated a bit and by putting on the hood of my sweatshirt and pulling the strings really tightly, I was able to make it through. (Why did this help? I don't know. It just did.).

One somewhat amusing non-movie event occurred early on at this show. I saw the film in a very small old theater and shortly after it began, someone a row or two behind me began loudly rustling food wrappers of some sort. The guy in the row in front of me kept looking back and glaring but the noise continued. Finally, he turned around and screamed "ENOUGH WITH THE WRAPPER ALREADY!". As the theater fell silent, I felt somewhat grateful to him for getting the noise to stop but was also very glad that I wasn't the woman sitting next to him, for I would no doubt be mortified. I also became fearful that I, too, would incur his wrath, so instead of happily munching on my popcorn as I had been, I found myself reaching gingerly into the bag and letting the kernels practically dissolve in my mouth.

Ok, maybe that story wasn't so amusing after all.

So anyway, if you have to get sick, try not to do it in Bucharest.