Moartea domnului Lazarescu

Cristi Puiu’s "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is a 154-minute one-joke movie, but since the joke concerns the end of a person’s life, it has a momentousness you can’t shake off. The obvious comparison is to Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, but the protagonist here is even less distinctive as a camera subject, poor, grizzled Mr. Lazarescu with his headache and swollen liver is almost completely closed off. He wets and soils himself, and still the other characters neighbors, nurses, and doctors lecture him about his drinking before turning their attention to matters like borrowed drills or horoscopes. Although a lone emergency medical technician takes her part in this indifferent universe, she’s helpless to hold anyone’s attention for long. It’s almost a blessing when Mr. Lazarescu slips into dementia. Of course, that means he’s unable to sign a consent form to be operated on. This Romanian movie defies categorization, and it haunts you like the ghost of any dead person you’ve ever ignored.

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