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Non-Foods

"Tracking shots are a matter of morality."

- Jean-Luc Godard

The Death of Mister Lazarescu is a masterpiece - easily better than any of the other films I saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival, and, with the possible exception of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows, better than any film that I saw anywhere last year. Yet the qualities that make it special are virtually indistinguishable from the qualities that will prevent it from gaining a wide release in the United States. Romanian director Cristi Puiu's second feature is not an escapist movie in any sense; it leads us back into the modern world and teaches us something about it. The Death of Mister Lazarescu is designed to make viewers upset with the limits of personal and collective freedom in a world governed by mortality. The film refuses to justify the societal inability to cope with material reality by providing an escape from it. Like all great art, The Death of Mister Lazarescu reminds us of the boundaries that prevent real happiness without providing cheap and temporary solutions to the ongoing existential crisis.

That The Death of Mister Lazarescu does not fit comfortably into our usual standards of what constitutes "entertainment" is more an indictment of our culture's trouble with appreciating art than it is a statement about the film's capacity to entertain. An outline of the film's simple plot will reveal its potential for both existential drama and dark humor. The titular character (Ion Fiscuteanu), a 63-year-old widower, nurses simultaneous head, stomach, and leg pains. After a small eternity in which he waits for an ambulance to arrive, Lazarescu is taken from hospital to hospital, as the ambulance driver (Luminita Gheorghiu) attempts to find one that will accept him. The doctors are simultaneously hostile to Lazarescu as a human being and incompetent when it comes to determining the cause of his predicament (Lazarescu gets a different diagnosis at each hospital). This situation is exacerbated by an offscreen bus crash that requires the attention of seemingly every ER in Bucharest.

Puiu allows the events to unfold in near-real time, a stylistic decision that shows an unusual amount of respect for viewers by allowing us the space to simultaneously become involved in the story and reflect on its implications for our own lives. It is as if the film is approaching us at our own level, at the actual rhythm of the world, so that we can become fully absorbed in the predicaments of the characters. (It certainly helps that the performances, especially by Fiscuteanu and Gheorghiu, are outstanding, supplying the film with the specificity it needs in order to make its general points about humanity palpable). By the end of the movie, we feel that we know the characters, an artistic feat that makes the film's existential dilemma more palpable and therefore more unsettling. The Death of Mister Lazarescu is a great humanist film because its respect for its characters extends to its audience. This is something that cannot be said for the millions of more commercially viable films that seem to think that they are doing us a favor by presenting the periodic jolts of "excitement" (think of the stupid plot twists in last year's Crash) that we supposedly need in order to stay involved in a film that deals with serious issues (or that bad filmmakers need in order to cover up the shallowness of their conceptions). The Death of Mister Lazarescu is an amazing work, but will it have a chance to survive in a society that is hostile toward art and geared toward promoting Mission: Impossible 3?

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