Talk Talk Talk November 2005

TALK TALK TALK

PHILIP O CEALLAIGH MEETS CRISTI PUIU, DIRECTOR OF THE DEATH OF MR LAZARESCU

November 2005

Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu is two and a half hours long, has no soundtrack and no dramatic surprises. It is filmed mostly in hospitals. The kind of thing that usually gets buried in a film festival programme and never resurfaces. Yet it has been creating a stir. In a country where writers and directors instinctively consider ordinary reality as unsuitable subject matter, the success of Lazarescu is something revolutionary.

Puiu’s careful piece of work, made on a budget of 350,000 euros, is hovering up the awards tables at film festivals and attracting attention at home. The result is a shock of recognition for most people, unused to seeing a depiction of their own country on the screen. It may just herald a change in how Romanians dare to depict their country in works of fiction.

The story of Lazarescu is based on an incident where a homeless man was taken from hospital to hospital, and eventually left in the street, where he died. This tale of bureaucracy and indifference is for some a damning critique of the new Romania, where survival depends on money and contacts. But a film made purely to deliver a political message would not manage to be the nuanced and natural piece of work that Lazarescu is. Puiu himself describes it as a film about selfishness, where every individual is interested in protecting himself. Lazarescu loses his life because the system allows those who have the power to save him to evade personal responsibility.

A 38-year-old native of Buchurest, Puiu went to study art in Geneva in 1990, but changed his specialisation from painting to film at the end of his first year. His attitude to film is peculiarly literary – he talks of fiction, of making stories out of life around you, and refers to the filmmaker as the ‘author’.

He considers himself lucky to have made Lazarescu, and is clearly enjoying it’s success. He poured me a tuica, and one for himself, and we began to talk about the complex Romanului – the awkwardness, perhaps lack of confidence, which Romanians feel abroad, and which affects how they feel about how they are depicted in film, and the style of fiction made in Romania.

Vivid: Do you have a feeling of not quite belonging, of awkwardness, [‘Te simti complexat…?’] at a film festival abroad?

Cristi Puiu: Sure. My own sense of discomfort is becoming less with time. Because I’ve been lucky to have made a film that has won prizes, and winning prizes is a form of international recognition. Now I have to write some letters to the organisers of film festivals and it scares me a bit because I don’t have a flair for PR. Obviously, there’s a lot of things that matter that don’t make up the facade you see of a film festival. It’s to do with how they treat you. They give you the same attention as other directors, regardless of where you’re from. You feel important, not in the sense that you ever become an idol to the festival employees, but they treat you in a way that wipes out any feeling you have of not quite belonging.

Some people say that your film looks like it was made with the idea of winning awards abroad.

That sounds like the kind of thing you say when you’re bitter at your own life. It’s a view of someone who doesn’t know the business, because it can’t be done. These are cliches: films made for the public, films made for festivals. For example, you can see that a film like Goodbye Lenin is made for festivals, but even that has an arguable aspect. Making a film for a festival supposes that there’s an infallible recipe that can distinguish a film from the other films selected for the festival. There’s no such recipe. If you know of one, tell me it, because I’d like to make Cannes every year. Admittedly, there are films which reveal the maker’s interest in being successful at a festival. Such films are as transitory as commercial films. Certain subjects are fashionable and directors spring up who speculate on the fashion and put them on the market. The ambulance thing isn’t in fashion.

It’s the first Romanian film I’ve seen which presents reality as it is. You see an apartment in a block and you recognise it as the place where you live.

You think that’s cool?

I think it’s normal.

You’ve no idea of the hammering I’ve taken for this. Well, for Romanians, it seems abnormal. In all the interviews I’ve given, the journalists always ask me: why make a film showing decaying blocks, dirty stovetops, and what will the West think of us? Why depict Romania as a place where poverty exists? And so on.

And I guess the people looked fairly unhappy.

It was a gruesome place at that time, at least it seemed so to me. It was December 1980, it was cold; there was very little heating in the buildings. There was very little light, nothing in the shops, nothing in the restaurants.

Romanians looked fairly grim, and everyone was afraid - afraid of their neighbors, afraid of their friends, afraid even of their own family members. People didn’t like to talk. And if I was seen talking to someone, they could be sure that they would be visited by the Securitate later in the day. “What was going on, what was their relationship to me?” they would be questioned. It was a pretty drab place at that time, and everyone told me it just got worse, in the later 1980s. If it was bad in the early 1980s then I can just imagine how bad it got in the late 1980s.

I think of realism, being able to show things as they are, as a basic narrative skill, whether in film or writing. So why do you think Romanians have this reflex reaction against realism?

You know how it is: the blocks are badly maintained, they have crumbling exteriors; Romanians complain, do nothing about it, there’s no solidarity, and as soon as someone manages to make a film and tell a story about something that has happened to them or the people they care about, there’s a backlash, and my interest in the world I live in is used as a stick against me. Because I had the gall to tell stories about them, and their dilapidated blocks. Showing them in a bad light. They think that people who see the film abroad will judge the way they live. This is a typical reaction in Romania. I’m trying to cure myself of this and the fact that it’s almost impudent to compare ourselves to great cultures and can’t go near them. And we tell ourselves this and belittle every success, including those of Romanians.

Some people say the film should be classified as a documentary.

Anybody who says that neither knows what fiction is nor what a documentary is. Because the actors act so naturally that they don’t appear to be actors, because it’s filmed as if with a hidden camera, they think it’s a kind of documentary. That’s a mistake. Any discussion that can be had within these parameters, of documentary versus fiction, is doomed to failure. Because for a long time, since the invention of cinematography, there has been this argument – concerning the degree to which the maker of a documentary intervenes and perverts reality, the degree to which he doesn’t let it be real on film.

There was an actual case that gave you the idea …

The film’s story has it’s origin in something real, a man who was taken by ambulance between many hospitals, after which he was left in the street. The real story helped us in the sense that it helped us to feign the traditional three-act dramatic formula. I created this succession of events arranged like beads on a string, almost identically. The entry and exit from a hospital, different in nuance, like a red bead, a green one, with the colours changing, but the result being the same. Like in the repetitive music of Phillip Glass, a repeating matrix.

Did you have to learn how things work in a hospital?

I already knew. I practically lived in a hospital. My father was the administrator of Colentina hospital and when me and my brother were little we hung around the school where my mother worked and the hospital, among the nurses and doctors.

And you learned something about medicine?

In the third grade, when I was ten years old, if you can believe it, I practically knew the seventh year anatomy textbook by heart. I grew up more with textbooks than with literature.

How did you know the term ‘melena’?

I heard about it when the father of a neighbour died. It was a word that immediately struck me as ugly. When I was twenty, when I had an ulcer, I found out all about ulcers and what they can lead to, including melena. After making the film Marfa si Banii (eng: Goods and Money) I had Mallory Weiss vomit blood; they cauterised it with an endoscope, and I learned for myself about melena. In 2001 I started to suffer from hypochondria and for two years I was on the Internet looking for illnesses that I thought I was suffering from. I had all kinds of symptoms, and was worried that I had cancer in my digestive system, a weak heart, and so on.

Do you know by how much workers numbers have been reduced since Mittal’s privatisation of Sidex? What other changes have been made there?

Yes, there are approximately 10,000 fewer workers, a result of the implementation of a voluntary retirement scheme and natural attrition. There have been many other changes, some of which include an increase in annual output from 3 million to 4 million tons of steel, the elimination of sales through multiple traders and the integration of those sales into the global marketing network of the Mittal Steel Group, and an increased focus on domestic market with more timely delivery of products and credit sales, and a reduction in barter business.

Are you still a hypochondriac?

I don’t have any cause to be now. When you have a problem in the body you’re born with, if it no longer functions, hypochondria results and it seems you suffer from every disease. It’s really bad. Mine lasted a very long time, a year and a half, nearly two. In the first year I drove everyone crazy.

I saw the film before it was released publicly, and I was surprised by the promotional poster. Bright colours, the cast standing around smiling. It suggests a comedy, or light drama.

I’ve taken all the precautions. If you go to a film called The Death of Mr Lazarescu expecting to see naked go-go dancers, that’s your business. The poster is as explicit as can be; it’s about a hospital. But the moment you leave the cinema and and look at the poster, can you still say it’s a comedy? The problem is we’re in Romania and the public expects any Romanian film that comes along to be bad. Few films are made in Romania – eight or nine a year at most. It’s not like in American cinema where all the genres are catered for, with comedies, cop films, war, drama, science fiction, whatever. In that kind of very precise cinematic environment I could have got away with a poster that really shows the drama of Lazarescu. It’s different here, with people running away from Romanian films, and I sat down and thought how I could trick the spectator, to indicate that there’s a few laughs in this film, because people really do laugh at it. When it was shown for the first time at TIFF (the Transylvanian International Film Festival – where it was voted most popular film and won the award for best director – ed), people were laughing fifteen minutes after it was over.

Do foreigners react in the same way?

Yes, but much less so. They laugh punctually at certain moments, but they don’t split their sides.

Your neighbourhood, Ozana, has a special place in your films.

I write about what I know. I can’t write a story about an amorous adventure which occurred on the 8th floor of the Alpha Bank building. I’ve never been there. There’s a short story by Borges about a guy with a colossal memory. He remembers everything he’s ever done. And because his memory keeps him awake at night, before going to bed he turns towards the part of the city where he’s heard they’re putting up a new building about which he knows nothing. Thinking about that, he covers himself with a kind of mist and he’s able to sleep. It’s like that for me, that bank is a haze. I don’t know what it looks like, what happens inside.

If you never move from Ozana, will you only create stories conected with that neighbourhood?

At the moment I’m tempted to say yes.

Would you direct from a screenplay written by someone else?

Never. The chances of someone giving me a screenplay and me liking it enough to direct it are very slim. I wouldn’t be able to integrate a written story.

Even one set in Ozana?

That’s got nothing to do with it. I was thinking of writing a screenplay with Razvan Radulescu based on Caragiale’s An Easter Torch. Another era, another place, another atmosphere, complete fiction from head to toe. It’s a challenge. But I’m writing it and the characters will speak like the people around me do.

What is your criteria in judging a film?

There’s no absolute way to measure these things, no fixed standard criteria. It’s a matter of the author’s sincerity. And there are marks of sincerity. I’m not interested in films where the director wants to make an impression on me. I’d even condemn them. I’m not interested in films in which the author wants to charm the spectator.

Probably you wouldn’t enjoy a film like Amelie.

I couldn’t stand it! I thought it was a big lie.

The music is great.

[Untranslatable profanity]. It’s like in that story of Orson Welles, which appears in a book called “I, Orson Welles”, in which he describes being with his wife at the cinema, at Ivan the Terrible and feeling sleepy - I don’t like Eisenstein either - and his wife pokes him with her elbow: ‘Are you asleep?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m listening to the music.” That’s what you can do at Amelie. I have a problem with music in films. I’m a rigid person and dislike things being mixed together…

Who are your favourite directors?

John Cassavetes. Robert Bresson, Raymond Depardon, Eric Rohmer, Hitchcock, Godard, Truffaut, Bunuel.

You don’t like the Russians?

Not so much. Though one of the films that excites me most is Nikita Mihalkov’s Unfinished Piece for a Mechanical Piano.

What’s next?

The expression “long and frequent rests, the keys to great success” applies in film. I think, with very few exceptions, such as Woody Allen, directors who have a snappy rhythm in turning out films burn out sooner or later. For now I’m promoting The Death of Mr Lazarescu.