Something to watch tonight: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

This has been a holy grail for me for 20 years. I saw it at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2006, was blown away, and then waited in vain for it to come back to cinemas or get any kind of a home release.

Imagine my sur­prise then, while I was dig­ging into the deep­er recesses of my loc­al lib­rar­y’s Kanopy stream­ing ser­vice, to find it lurk­ing there. Would it still hold up after all this time?

It’s not a prom­ising premise: an alco­hol­ic wid­ower liv­ing alone with his cats in a Bucharest apart­ment, has a head­ache and then a stom­ach ache. Eventually a neigh­bour per­suades the ambu­lance ser­vice to come and vis­it but it’s a Saturday night and there has been a big bus crash in the city with lots of casualties.

Across the night, he is shuttled around sev­er­al dif­fer­ent hos­pit­als while his con­di­tion con­tin­ues to deteri­or­ate. We meet sev­er­al dif­fer­ent teams of med­ic­al pro­fes­sion­als, none of whom are par­tic­u­larly com­mit­ted to his wel­fare once they smell the alco­hol on his breath.

It won the Un Certain Regard prize for best first film at Cannes in 2005¹ and it was the first big hit² in an excit­ing run of Romanian New Wave films that included 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Beyond the Hills, Sieranevada and Graduation.

When I real­ised that I was going to get anoth­er chance to see the film, I wondered how the prob­lems that Mr. Lazarescu encoun­ters would com­pare with the doc­u­mented exper­i­ences that New Zealanders are hav­ing with our own health sys­tem. My memory of the film was of a scath­ing indict­ment of sys­tem­ic fail­ure and I was all primed to use it to have a go at our own.

But a second view­ing sug­gests that I would be wrong. There is over­crowding but the patients are patient. Patronising doc­tors refuse to listen to oth­er opin­ions but that’s more of a ‘them’ thing than some­thing baked in to the sys­tem. What dir­ect­or Cristi Puiu does here is cre­ate fas­cin­at­ing, defined char­ac­ters every step of the way, all of whom come with their own bag­gage, all of whom wish they were some­where else in the middle of a stress­ful Saturday night. It’s a pro­duc­tion line and Mr. Lazarescu is just anoth­er product being passed along it. (And for some reas­on, all of the young female doc­tors and nurses look like supermodels.)

But there was some­thing else that hit even harder this time around – how close to home the story has become. Mr. Lazarescu is only 63 but looks a lot older. His neigh­bour calls him “Engineer” so he may have been some­body once. His liv­ing room has posters of the English 80s pop star Kim Wilde.

I was 58 last birth­day and had a brief spell in our loc­al hos­pit­al sys­tem earli­er this year. The care was exem­plary and the follow-up has been deeply grat­i­fy­ing. But I am now in the tar­get mar­ket for stor­ies like this. It’s no longer the­or­et­ic­al. I found it to be more per­son­ally con­front­ing than I was ready for, to be honest.

Back in 2006, Bill Gosden prac­tic­ally begged audi­ences to come to the NZIFF screenings:

It’s some­times the case that the greatest movies are the hard­est ones to per­suade an audi­ence to see, and this truly great movie is surely one of them. But if you don’t believe that a Romanian drama about a 63-year-old drunk try­ing to obtain the med­ic­al atten­tion he’s con­vinced he needs could be the year’s most mes­mer­ising, sus­pense­ful, darkly funny, shrewdly humane and spir­itu­ally chal­len­ging movie, then it can only be because you have not yet seen The Death of Mr Lazarescu.

…

Puiu’s spec­tacle of life going on is as daunt­ing in its heed­less inex­or­ab­il­ity as death itself. Magnificent.

As I said, this has been almost impossible to see here in NZ since 2006 and the ver­sion that is stream­ing on Kanopy seems to be of dubi­ous ori­gin. Looking like a badly ripped copy of a Hong Kong fleamar­ket pir­ate DVD, it’s hard to recom­mend spend­ing two and a half hours with this version.

I see that Criterion Channel has it in the US so I’ll check that ver­sion and report back.

---

Where to watch The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Aotearoa: Streaming on Kanopy³

Australia: Digital rent­al (Google)

Canada: Not cur­rently available

Ireland: Not cur­rently available

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel

UK: Not cur­rently available

---

Further listening

Had a great time last night talk­ing screens with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights. Made the case that the next sea­son of Sugar on Apple TV should be more like The Rockford Files; gave a shoutout to Gavin Shoebridge for his YouTube motor­ing reviews; and also reviewed the Anthony Bourdain portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-dickhead movie, Tony.

---

1. Unlike now when Cannes titles arrive almost imme­di­ately, this one took a year to get to Wellington. ↩︎
2. “Big hit”. ↩︎
3. Available through par­ti­cip­at­ing pub­lic lib­rar­ies. Titles may vary by lib­rary. ↩︎