MEDIA
Have you met Mr Lazarescu?

by Alex Ulmanu
October 2005

Have you met Mr Lazarescu? Because if you haven’t, you should. Mr Lazarescu, a 62-year-old retired widower, lives with three cats in a run down apartment in one of Bucharest’s communist-style blocks of flats. When you open the apartment door on a Saturday night, you can hear the loud music from one of the parties upstairs. His next door neighbour knows a lot about medicines, has a wife whose life revolves around the kitchen and tells Mr Lazarescu cats and drinking are bad for his health. He should know; he got sick last year because of his drinking.

To cut a long (two and a half hour) story short, Mr Lazarescu becomes ill one Saturday evening, calls for an ambulance several times, alerts his neighbours, and is eventually taken to the hospital by a middle-aged nurse who believes he has problems with his colon, although the old man knew it was from his 12-year-old ulcer. Actually, it was his liver, plus a blood clot in his brain. All night long, Mr Lazarescu is carried from hospital to hospital, as doctors refuse to either admit him or operate on him.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu is probably the most realistic of all films made in Romania in the past 15 years. It is heavy and dark, as it tells a sad story in a non-commercial manner. The crew, led by the film’s director, 38-year-old Cristi Puiu, filmed for more than a month in several Bucharest hospitals, only at night. The frames are long, giving the sequences a grainy, real life feel. If it were cut with some economy and concern for the public, it could have been a 90-minute film rather than a two and a half hour one.

Actually, that is precisely why some people have critcised the film: it is overly long, and the story is too real – for Romanians, it is not one of those movies which you see in order to escape from your daily life and have a fun time. It is crude, in-your-face reality. Lazarescu could be your next-door neighbour; it could be you, or your father. Lazarescu’s neighbours could be your neighbours, or you could recognise yourself and your family in them. The apartment building could be yours. The music coming from the lobby when Lazarescu opens his apartment door could come from your party. Perhaps you have stood in those hospital hallways shown in the film, and heard the doctors and nurses saying the same words you hear in the movie. Talk of astrology in Cristi Puiu’s film echoes the kinds of conversations of Romanians in everyday life.

‘Why should I go see a movie that pictures my real life? I’ve got enough real life already,’ wrote one reader to Evenimentul Zilei’s website’s comments section.

Indeed, I think he should. And, if you are not Romanian and want to know a thing or two about Romanians, their attitudes, hang-ups and their healthcare system, you should too. The copy I saw had English subtitles, so if you don’t speak Romanian it shouldn’t be a problem. What The Death of
Mr Lazarescu brings to Romanian cinema that is new is realism. The story does not suffer from the grotesque exaggerations of other post-1989 Romanian films; the dialogue is free from that theatrical, artificial tone most Romanian movies have (except for Nae Caranfil’s films, such as Filantropica, Asfalt Tango or E pericoloso Sporgersi). The actors speak like real people, not self-consciously, as if to an audience from a stage.

The film speaks of the problems in Romanian hospitals without showing cockroaches, lousy food, and overcrowded rooms in need of some paint. Quite the contrary, emergency rooms seem to be quite acceptable; moreover, there is equipment, well-trained medical personnel, and doctors who refuse bribes. Probably this is one of the reasons why the movie was so well-received in the West: Lazarescu has toured the festivals and has won some important prizes, such as that dedicated to young directors at Cannes, and the Jury Award in Copenhagen, where the actor Ioan Fiscuteanu also took the prize for best male performer.

But the systemic problem Puiu’s film presents not only relate to Romania’s health system. The film speaks of lack of communication, and of indifference. Overworked and buried in bureaucracy, doctors often tend to forget to put the patient’s interests first. Complex paperwork is often frustrating, but often provides a convenient way of avoiding responsibility. When a doctor is scared to admit or operate on a patient because he could die on their shift, one has a myriad of bureaucratic tools to send the poor man away.

Director Cristi Puiu said the idea for the film came from a real news story, about a man who died several years ago after having to travel hundreds of kilometres between three hospitals in the Oltenia region. A search through news archives shows there have been several other similar cases in recent years. And there are many other examples of malpractice, of which just the most sensational surface in the media – from the surgeon who recently sliced off a patient’s penis during a routine surgical procedure, to the doctors in Galati who refused to assist a pregnant woman in labour because she was HIV-positive, to the thousands of children who became sick in the early 1990s because they received HIV-contaminated blood transfusions.

Many of the doctors involved in such cases have not been punished. Many hospitals have not paid damages to the families of those who suffered from malpractice. The doctor in Galati who, shocked by the indifference and lack of professionalism of his colleagues toward a pregnant HIV-positive woman, alerted the press and the Medical College (the doctors’ supreme ethics council), only to be told by his supervisors he should have shown more decency and kept quiet. The Ministry of Health has failed to indicate who was responsible for the contaminated blood transfusions that shattered the lives of thousands of children and their families.

Maybe Cristi Puiu’s film will relaunch the debate about the systemic problems of the Romanian health system. For 15 years, one health minister after another has failed to reform the system, with the main problems remaining lack of funding for hospitals and poor pay for medical personnel. What if that’s just part of the problem? Besides money, many Romanian hospitals need more efficient management in order to make better use of existing resources, simplify bureaucracy, and introduce a working accountability system.
Then again, Mr Lazarescu could die anyway. Like many Romanians, he drinks too much, eats unhealthily, and self-medicates. One doctor tells a nurse, ‘Take him quickly to the brain surgeon to operate on him so that he could die peacefully at home, of cancer.’

Alex Ulmanu lectures on journalism and works for Evenimentul Zilei.