For anyone who has made a trip to or has accompanied a loved one to the emergency room, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" may be too realistic to bear.
A few years ago, my family called the ambulance for one of our relatives. He was having vague back pain -- we couldn't get him to communicate with us about it. He didn't want to go to the hospital, but his pain was too great for him not to. He is an alcoholic, and to this day lives under the assumption that none of us know he's an alcoholic, so I think his fear of the hospital had somewhat to do with the fear that his "secret" would be exposed. We ended up in a living hell of smug doctors, each with a different diagnosis of his condition, but who were all in agreement that the patient should be treated like dirt because of his addiction. If he wasn't going to care about his own health, they seemed to think, then why should they?
So needless to say, despite the fact that it takes place in Romania, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" hit frightfully close to home for me, as it's about a lonely, alcoholic man and his nighttime trip into the purgatory of emergency-room bureaucracy. The foreign setting aside, this film could have taken place in the USA and been no different. Nobody has time for Mr. Lazarescu, everyone has a different theory as to what is wrong with him, the nurses are more interested in making sure paperwork is filled out than they are in taking care of the living, breathing human being suffering -- and perhaps dying -- on the stretcher in front of them. In one scene, the doctors insult and belittle the ambulance nurse when she tries to offer her own assessment of Mr. Lazarescu's condition, holding their advanced schooling over and against her. We don't learn much about Mr. Lazarescu, and so we see events occur from the perspective of this paramedic who takes charge of him and carts him from one hospital to the next in a desperate attempt to find one that will treat him. To her, Mr. Lazarescu is a job, yet she's the closest thing to a caring relative he has, so cold and indifferent is the rest of the health care world.
This film is astonishing in its meticulous detail, and it's hard to believe it's not a documentary, something out of the world of Fredrick Wiseman. Most scenes are filmed in long takes, the camera standing back at an objective distance simply capturing the whirl of human activity taking place around it. The acting is amazing, for the very reason that no one seems to be acting. It's a deeply unsettling film; we know Mr. Lazarescu will likely die -- from cancer if not from the surgery he's about to undergo when the film closes, and anyway, the title tells us as much. But we don't see him die in the film -- the last scene is of him being washed, shaved and dressed for surgery, a human being reduced to a slab of living flesh on a table, robbed of even his last shred of dignity, while no one appears to care. Somehow, that lack of closure is one of the most unsettling things in the film; it captures the feeling one has when you've finally gotten your loved one to the hospital and all you can do is wait, not sure whether or not you're going to see him alive again.
Grade: A
