Nr. 3 (24) anul VII / iulie-septembrie 2009 - ROMDIDAC

EX PONTO NR.3, 2009
160
part through the entire movie and that spectators were forced to experience
the inconvenient position of the collaborator and to witness a drama which
otherwise they would have chosen not to see.
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu: Another Kind of Docu-drama
Cristi Puiu’s film preceded 4 Months by less than two years. It was closer
to a documentary than Mungiu’s film because of the explicit recurrence of
“consistent patterns of behavior” (Ellis 14). As in any classic “naturalistic”
documentary, 7 Puiu is interested in documenting what is specific for the
daily rituals of his “subjects.” Lazarescu is talking to his cats, and having
a shot of homemade brandy a couple of times a day while his neighbors
are continuously contradicting each other, the husband always winning the
arguments, the wife always giving in submissively. In the public sphere, rituals
are not necessarily different: the ER doctors in four hospitals of Bucharest
are aggressively asserting their professional superiority in front of nurses
and patients alike. Furthermore, on the night when Lazarescu needs their
help most, they are overwhelmed by the number of victims coming from a
bus accident. The victims themselves are Romanians traveling by coach to
Europe in search of a menial job. All are typical for Romanian society. The
language clichés, the gestures, and the attitudes are recorded with the care
of the ethnographer.
For achieving the appearance of a rudimentary documentary, Puiu casts
his actor friends, who were completely unknown at that time, in the major
roles, and casts stars in episodic ones. The latter remain unnoticed even to a
Romanian audience who would not have expected them in such minor parts.
Without minimizing the actors’ contribution to their characters, it seems that the
cast of the film was selected in conformity with extra-artistic criteria, perhaps
financial and personal. Thus, Ion Fiscuteanu got the role of Mr Lazarescu
Dante Remus (a 62 year-old retired engineer, originally from Tirgu-Mures
(Transilvania), who lives and dies in Bucharest) because of his standard low
fee as a supporting actor and more importantly, because of his Transilvanian
descent. Born in Bistrita Nasaud, he was an authentic native speaker of the
Transilvanian dialect, not to mention his having had the personal experience
of suffering from a terminal illness which caused his real death the very next
year.
Unlike Mungiu’s “reconstruction of the event,” which was meant to suggest
the Romanians’ guilt and resentfulness about communism, Puiu’s film has
“no conventional dramaturgical progression from exposition to complication
to discovery to climax to denouement” (Ellis 2) for the same reason. The lack
of any narrative thread suggests the lack of coherence of Romanian society
which could not cleanse itself and recover from the communist mentality.
The camera is recording the catabasis of Mr Lazarescu (possibly an allegory
of the Romanian old world) in the darkness of the Underworld, the unseen
world behind the closed doors of the ambulance, the emergency room, and
surgery unit. It violates the privacy of the suffering individual in each station
of the labyrinthine wandering in the night in Bucharest hospitals, following Mr
Lazarescu’s descent to the Underworld to confront the ultimate revelation that
there is no mystery of life and death. The recurrent images from above the
protagonist who lies in his bed, the hospital bed, the ambulance stretcher, and
who gets down the stairs, gets out of the car, create the symbolic perspective
of a looking down on Romanian life. The Romanians’ life is the Hell from which