The death of mister Lazarescu (2005)

I've been looking forward to watching The death of mister Lazarescu (2005) for a long time. Now that I've seen it, I am satisfied to say that it lived up to all my expectations. Even though the story is depressing as hell the film represents a raw kind of dark comedy. The film takes off with images of mister Lazarescu, an elderly, lonely man who lives with his cats. He downs some drinks and calls the ambulance to tell them he is sick and needs to get to the hospital. He receives some help from his neighbors (who reproach him for letting his cats pee in the stairwell) and then, finally, an ambulance arrives. But the events that follow bring little hope for mister Lazarescu. He is shuttled from hospital to hospital, rejected on various grounds, there is no place for him, he fails to conform to the doctor's legalistic definition of what it means to go into surgery "voluntarily". This is a brutal film about bureaucracy, depersonalization and institutionalization. For most characters in the film - not all - Lazarescu is just another drunk the treatment of whom society cannot afford. When the ambulance personnel bring him to yet another hospital, he is met with the standard question: "You have been drinking?" And, later on: "This man has peed his pants?" What makes this film so great is that it is sober (no pun intended). It's a film about society and work. But this is not a lecture in sociology. Puiu's characters are not built like representatives of their societal role & function (that might be justified in some films, I'd say, but Puiu's film takes another path).
Puiu has made a film that is good in several ways. Even though there are not many obvious experiments to be found here in terms of cinematography etc., the style of sometimes wobbly hand-held camera fits its style. Puiu follows mister Lazarescu's journey in and out of consciousness, dismissals, how he is sometimes tended to, how night turns into morning, with an admirable palette of perspectives and atmospheres. There is no big statement about humanity being either this way or that way. It's a film where cynicism is described as cynicism and, even more interestingly, where those doctors and nurses who are not cynical are NOT depicted as heroic, quasi-celestial beings. It's a down-to-earth film that is evident both in its treatment of cruelty and goodness. This might be a quite rare thing, actually - because goodness tends to be transformed into either naivety or some inexplicable spurt of altruistic action.

The ending of the movie, which I won't spoil, is a moment of sheer brilliance. As is the rest of the film.