Cristi Puiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu
- Producing Organization
- WBEZ
- Contributing Organization
- WBEZ (Chicago, Illinois)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip/50-01bk3mhj
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- Description
- Description
- " Cristi Puiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu Cristi Puiu is very aware that the title of his film, Death of Mr. Lazarescu, is hardly a selling point. From the title, the prospective audience knows that the film is about a character named Lazarescu who is dying. But Puiu has an answer to the question, Why should the public go to see a movie about an old man who dies? The film, says Puiu, is about the death of a human being. The spectator has to have the courage to imagine himself as a future corpse. If he can do that, then he has to go and see the movie. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the winner of the Un Certain Regard section at last year's Cannes Film Festival, the Romanian submission for Best Foreign Language Academy Award, is a 2½ hour feature about a 60-year-old widower living in Bucharest who doesn't feel too good one night. His head and stomach ache. He calls for the ambulance. It doesn't come. He asks his neighbors for some pills, and they finally call and manage to get a medic and a driver to show up. But for Mr. Lazarescu, the journey through the circles of hell, represented here by the Bucharest medical services, is only beginning. For one thing, Lazarescu picked a bad night to get sick. There's been a bus accident and the emergency rooms are crowded. Lazarescu will be transferred to four different hospitals before his suffering is over and he dies. Puiu is not interested much in giving us too many details about Lazarescu as a character. He drinks a little. He lives with cats. His apartment is a mess. He has a daughter somewhere in Canada, and a sister on the outskirts of Bucharest. After two and a half hours, we don't really know much more than this. Instead of character, Piui's focus is on capturing the temperature of the human condition as it circles around the dying Lazarescu. Doctors and medics diagnose what's wrong with Lazarescu anecdotally, on the fly. They are more interested in banter, in flirting with each other, in that medical-circle small talk which anyone who has visited a hospital knows well, and which is surprising because it has so little to do with patients, medicine or curing anyone of anything. Obviously, Puiu and his co-screenwriter, Razvan Radulescu, have done their homework and observed well. Much of the interaction with Lazarescu from the medical staff he encounters is arrogant. They are tired, overworked, and impatient. He is seen by a small army of doctors, and is subjected to patronizing comments from most. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is as if ER, the TV show, was directed by Frederick Wiseman. Puiu credits the work of Jim Jarmusch, Cassavetes, and Eric Rohmer as his influences. But he contrasts his approach to filming medicine in action from ER by saying, When you watch the American TV series, there's movement in every direction, the choreography of the characters is amazing In my country, doctors and everyone else live in slow motion, as if they were on valium, and still had 500 years to live. There is a lot of humor in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and there is a hopeful thread. The medic, Mioara, who comes to pick him up from the apartment, accompanies Lazarescu on his journey through the Romanian medical system. As we watch Lazarescu's physical condition gradually fail, she emerges as someone who defends him and fights for him, becomes a buffer and an advocate against the over-stressed and disconnected medical staff. Puiu sees love as the central theme of his film: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. He says, It is a movie about love, but also a movie in which love does not exist. In reaching and articulating a universal theme. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu reaches far beyond the emergency rooms of Bucharest, to the central question of one individual's capacity and ability to commit to another. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio's Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. "
- Media type
- Sound
- Credits
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: WBEZ
Editor: Drew Hill
Producing Organization: WBEZ
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
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Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ-FM) and Vocalo.org
Identifier: (unknown)
Format: audio/mpeg
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- Citations
- Chicago: “Cristi Puiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed June 17, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-01bk3mhj.
- MLA: “Cristi Puiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu.” WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. June 17, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-01bk3mhj>.
- APA: Cristi Puiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Boston, MA: WBEZ, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-50-01bk3mhj