Jonathan Miller has an anecdote about how he came to appreciate how fine the line is between life and death. As a young medical student, he was shown into the dissection room for the first time, and was confronted with a row of recently deceased cadavers, of various ages. His first thought was: "These people - they don't look at all well."

One person who really doesn't look well is Mr Lazarescu, the 63-year-old widower who is the hero of this magnificent new film from Romanian director Cristi Puiu. It is about the endgame of old age - a blacker-than-black, deader-than-deadpan comedy with something of the documentary style of Frederick Wiseman and something also of Samuel Beckett. Poor Mr Lazarescu's illnesses, aches and pains are snowballing into a critical mass of mortality, and over the movie's running time we realise that, at some stage, he has crossed the invisible line that awaits all of us: the line between being unwell and being a dead man walking.

Or in Mr Lazarescu's case: a dead man lying down moaning or being carried into an ambulance incessantly complaining. Lazarescu (played by Ion Fiscuteanu) is a grumpy, lonely man in state housing in Bucharest, where he has lived all his life. His earliest memory, to which he is vividly returned by the imminence of death, is of being two years old, in 1944, when the Americans bombed the capital city.

On this fateful day, we see Mr Lazarescu dazed and in discomfort, and it is not clear if today is worse than any other day. He has a pain in his stomach, and in his head - pains that he obsessively attributes to an ulcer operation he had eight years ago. But he is not just an old geezer: Lazarescu was once a formidable professional man. His genial neighbour calls him "the intellectual" and "Mr Engineer". Like everyone else, he thinks this new complaint is down to Lazarescu's heavy drinking. The only person who cares about him is the paramedic Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu) who takes him to the hospital and to what is laughingly known as the "ER". Business there is conducted at a Soviet tempo of bureaucratic resentment and depression. It is only owing to Mioara's persistence that the uncaring doctors finally take Lazarescu's situation seriously. His first name is Dante, an ironic allusion to the successive circles of clinical hell and of course that surname promises the opposite of resurrection.

It seems extraordinary to claim that this film is funny but it is, because Lazarescu's decline into catatonia and stillness - mumbling, wheezing and whimpering against the dying of the light - is in superb counterpoint to the loquacious performances from incidental characters, forever jabbering and squabbling with each other about trivial matters while Lazarescu goes into his twilight moments. He is trembling on eternity's threshold and one grumpy doctor laments only that no one will lend him a Nokia charger. There is some great one-side-of-the-telephone-conversation comedy, and a running gag about everyone asking the patient how much he has been drinking.

Finally, the white-coated vultures decide he has a colon tumour and a haematoma from a fall, and I laughed out loud at the brutal realism of one doctor who, in a boisterous parody of caringness, shouts down the corridor as Lazarescu is rolled away into the operating theatre. "Operate on that head wound, so he can die at home - from cancer!"

Part of the film's brilliance is its stunning and unforgiving transmission of the great truth that for most of us, death is not a single, flatline moment, but a gradual, insidious process of deterioration. When does it begin: in one's 70s? Or 60s? 50s? 40s? Is the second half of our life a matter of swimming harder and harder and harder against the receding tide? Perhaps. But the process is heroic, and Mr Lazarescu, even though he has so little to say, has the mute rhetoric of a hero.

The inspiration for, and making of the film:

According to Cristi Puiu, the initial impetus for the film came out of his public conflict with the National Council of Cinematography (CNC), a Romanian public institution which is the main provider of financing for filmmaking in Romania. Both in 2001 and 2003, Cristi Puiu, sustained by other young Romanian film directors (such as Nae Caranfil and Cristian Mungiu) accused CNC of directing financing towards the members of its Advising Council, lead by Sergiu Nicolaescu, and their protégés. As a reaction to the long fight with CNC, in 2003 Puiu wrote in a few weeks the synopsis for a six film cycle he called Six stories from the outskirts of Bucharest (including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu). He initially planned them as low budget films, trying to prove that Romanian directors can make films without aid from the CNC.

The medical framework in which the story of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu unfolds grew out of a two year period (between 2001 and 2003) Cristi Puiu spent suffering from hypochondria. Although only suffering from stress and a common form of colitis, Puiu became convinced that he had a terminal disease. The resulting fear of dying made him obsessively collect information on diseases and medication, as well as giving him direct experience with the medical system. All this information then naturally formed the basis for setting his next movie in a medical background.

Another inspiration for the subject of the film was the actual 1997 case of Constantin Nica, a 52 year old man who, after being sent away from several hospitals, was left in the street by the paramedics and died.
After finishing the synopsis for the six films in Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest, Cristi Puiu showed them to Razvan Radulescu, a writer and screenwriter. They started documenting for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu by going to various doctors and hospitals, then completed the screenplay. Puiu and Radulescu participated with the film in the 2004 Script Contest organised by the CNC. However, the CNC refused financing for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, ignoring Puiu's previous success (e.g., he had won the Golden Bear Award for his short film Cigarettes and Coffee the same year). Puiu made an appeal to Razvan Theodorescu, the Minister of Culture at the time, who approved it immediately, overruling the CNC decision.

The actual filming was accomplished over 39 nights, in November-December 2004. Because the film was finished late in the year, the crew worked very hard to make it in time for Cannes film festival. The film was completed on an overall budget of EUR 350,000. To produce this film, Cristi Puiu started his own production company, Mandragora, together with his wife and Alexandru Munteanu, the executive producer of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. All marketing decisions were left to his partners in the production company, Puiu focusing on the artistic and technical issues.

Why do you think this Romanian tale has resonated so much on the international festival circuit?
I don't think I can give you the right answer, just a supposition which is related to a Truffaut quote: "A film has to tell us something about life and something about cinema." So this is what I think: the film contains a vision of life-the story about a human being who dies alone, surrounded by the indifference of the others-and a vision of cinema. For me, cinema is less an art form than a technique for investigating reality. And this is not a Romanian tale, but a tale from Romania.

When you say "investigating reality," what do you mean?
Reality is like a monster with many heads. We are talking about an object that is not defined. I am trying to define reality and what it consists of. So it becomes for me very passionate, very enjoyable, and challenging.

How has this story played in your native country? Has it been well received?
The film was pretty well received and the reactions were rather positive. Nevertheless, some people got really pissed off by the story-the way I portray the characters and the situations-saying that this film affects the image of Romania abroad.

Were there any cinematic or literary models that you were thinking of when you were making the film?
My main influences come from Romanian literature and poetry, artists that have influenced me in general. One is Eugene Ionesco and his Theatre of the Absurd. The others are two poets whom I'd call "the poets of the silent despair," George Bacovia and Virgil Mazilescu. From universal literature and art I found some other models such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. My conception of cinema is the result of the "lessons" I got from the authors above and the discovery of the works of Cassavetes, Wiseman, Rohmer, and Depardon.

You have said the movie is about the failure to love, but it is also about what Mr. Lazarescu calls "the problem of mortality." You ask your audience to watch a man die before their eyes. Were you ever worried that this was too much to ask of them?
I worried, yes, but not for long. I conceive of cinema and music and literature and art in terms of testimony. I am interested in an author as long as his work represents a confession. I am making films about myself, and DOML is an example (a secondary effect) of me thinking about my own death. For years and years I asked myself about the function an artist can have in a community, and I tried to define his status. It is not an easy job, especially when the community is so skeptical about you and your "products."

Some time ago, rereading the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to my older daughter, I realized that I had been in touch with one possible definition of the artist for a long time (and since then I am more and more persuaded that it is so), and that is the child who's shouting, "The Emperor is naked!" So I'm trying to raise myself to the level of this child and tell you, the audience, just what I think and feel-just what I can see from my window (like André Gide's TITIR).

Back