Dealing with Dr Death

Around these parts we do like it when a director sounds like a proper director and not some bounder who might just as easily be picking syringes out of the canal had events not conspired to place them behind a camera. So we’re very pleased to meet 38 year-old Cristi Puiu, the Romanian author of The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu.
The film, winner of Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year, follows its unfortunate protagonist as he is shuffled between crowded hospitals on a Saturday night in Bucharest. Shot in long naturalistic strokes, it might easily be mistaken for a documentary, particularly one of Frederick Wiseman’s critiques of public institutions.
“The style was certainly a reflection of my interest in the documentary,” Mr. Puiu tells me. “I often think of the Godard quote, that every cut is a lie. I was hoping that between cuts I might hit on the truth, and it was also important to introduce the feeling of waiting. There had to be a sense that we are watching normal medical procedure.”
Unsurprisingly, The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu frequently plays like an anti-E.R., with little hope of George Clooney or Goran Visnjic coming to the rescue.
“I find E.R. and that kind of portrayal of medical services to be quite revolting,” explains the writer-director. “I don’t believe doctors are so attached to their patients. That’s why I included the conversation where one of them is looking for a Nokia charger. They don’t get emotionally involved in individual cases. At least not here in Romania, I can assure you.”
Though many will identify with Mr. Puiu’s depiction of cold indifference in the hospital waiting room, he was particularly keen to capture a peculiarly local cynicism.
“I was more interested in telling a story about a man dying than criticising the Romanian health system,” he says, “but as long as you are telling a story about a community, you must establish the context of indifferent doctors. There are a lot of explanations as opposed to excuses for this indifference. But it defines the health care system and our community. Indifference is a national sport, or at least it is in Bucharest. The people are aggressive. It’s become normal in the post-communist society. It was easy under Ceausescu. You could blame him all the bad things. We need to hate somebody, like the Arabs need to hate the Jews. You need an enemy and an incarnation of evil. After Ceausescu, we started to hate each other, often for material reasons, but also because we need to hate.”
Well, Mr. Puiu would appear to be stuck there for the moment. Lazarescu is intended as the first of six films in a Bucharest cycle. He admits it is perhaps the least jolly subject in the series - the other films will focus on “love between a man and a woman,” “love for your children,” “love of success,” “love between friends,” and “carnal love” – but his own experiences as a hypochondriac made it the most urgent. (Tellingly, he is also afraid to fly.)
“In 2001 I was coming to Cannes with my first film,” he recalls. “And I became very scared about it. I went to doctors. I was surfing the internet trying to find my symptoms. I was convinced I had colon cancer. Then I thought I had lots of other diseases. I thought I had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which paralyzes your muscles. So when I started writing the script I knew lots of things about the liver and was able to use that as a starting point for the film.”
Well, it’s close to suffering for your art.