202. Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film “Bacalaureat” (Graduation) (2016) (Romania), based on his own original screenplay: Fallouts of a father-daughter protective relationship within a contemporary corrupt East European social framework

The year 2016 saw the release of three very interesting award-winning films from three countries on two continents—all films on the same theme.  All three films deal with the father-daughter protective relationship under different patriarchal scenarios.  Daughter is an Iranian film and presents an interesting tale set in a society where the male members of the family protect their wives and their daughters until they are married with a ferocity that might surprise many in Western developed countries. Graduation is a Romanian film with another interesting tale where the father travels the proverbial extra mile to ensure his daughter benefits from a prized graduate education in a prestigious English university that will help her in her future career, a chance he himself never got in Communist and post-Communist worlds. The third film is Toni Erdmann from Germany where the daughter is older and busy trying to climb the corporate ladder without much thought for her father whose only true companion is reduced to his dog. 

In all three films, the role of the mother is marginal. The two European films clearly indicate that the women in Romania and Germany enjoy a greater freedom of action compared to the male-dominated Iran.  In two of the three films, the women have the last word. How interesting it is to find parallel tales emerging from three different communities that grapple with the same concerns almost simultaneously! All three underline love of a father for a daughter.  Interestingly, in all the three films the father does not have a son and only has a single daughter, all old enough to make their own decisions!!!

The father's (back to camera) concern as the daughter drives off
with her boyfriend

The Romanian film Graduation offers the viewer much to mull over beyond the obvious father-daughter relationship. It reflects the statement made by the director Mungiu in an interview to the Los Angeles Times reporter Steven Zeitchik in May 2016, “We live in a world and society that is not very moral but is made up of people who believe they are moral. I come from a country where everyone talks about corruption but they blame someone else.”

It is useful to evaluate the father figure in this film with this comment from its director in perspective. The father figure is a respected doctor and honest in his profession. Yet he is not honest to his wife as he is having an adulterous affair with a single mother. His wife does not know this but suspects his infidelity. The couple seem to be leading a frosty relationship within the small apartment, while the doctor claims to be an idealist. The doctor’s smart daughter is clever enough to be aware of the affair. 

So when the viewer of the film is shown someone throwing a stone at the doctor’s closed windowpane and smashing it, we know there is a message that all is not well.  And this happens before the good doctor stoops to do a corrupt act to help his only daughter in her future life. All through the film we never get to know who threw the stone and why it was thrown.

Later in the film, doctor’s daughter is sexually attacked on a forlorn stretch of land on the way to her place of study and she is able to fend off the attacker but is naturally mentally disturbed by the incident. Despite the father’s clout with police and a police line-up of suspects, the daughter fails to identify the attacker. Once again the viewer is flummoxed. Who attacked the daughter? Who threw the stone? Who is attacking the family? Or is it all a mistaken coincidence of unrelated events?

The very concerned parents are sitting
symbolically apart after the daughter
 is attacked in the hospital

The father who loves his daughter wants to ensure that the daughter gets the required grades to get the scholarship to UK. He is worried that the recent attack on his daughter could affect his daughter’s grades and his dream roadmap for his daughter would go up in smoke. He uses his network of acquaintances who he can tap to ensure his daughter’s examination answer papers fetch the required marks for the UK education.  In the post-Communist “if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” scenario, the father ensures that his daughter would get the required marks if her papers are marked by his daughter with a symbol that the answer-paper evaluator will recognize as hers.

The father uses his contacts in the police force to identify
his daughter's (right)  attacker

Now if you have viewed the past works of director Mungiu you can expect an end that will surprise the viewer. That indeed is the case with Graduation. The end of the film surprise most viewers. Mungiu’s strength lies in how he ends his films. Graduation is no exception to that trend. It definitely jolted the Cannes film festival jury to bestow on him the Best Director award.  At the Chicago international film festival the jury again awarded the film the best screenplay award to Mungiu for “a narration that works with suspense as well as slice of life, creating a whodunit story structure while staying emotionally extremely close to the main character.”  And just as the father in the Iranian film Daughter won the best actor award at Moscow for the role of the father, the actor in the role of the father in Graduation won the Best Actor award at Chicago for the “ subtle yet hard-hitting impression he delivered of a father getting himself into corruption for which he pays a heavy price. His portrayal of his love for his daughter as well as his pushiness to control her future is extremely captivating” to quote the citation.

The police line-up does not help; the mysteries in the film remain unresolved

There are three exciting new/young directors making films in Romania: Cristian Mungiu, Calin Peter Netzer, and Cristi Puiu. None of them are likely to disappoint a discerning viewer as the power of each of their tales goes beyond boundaries of the stories. Each work will make you think.

P.S. Daughter and Graduation are both included in the author’s top 10 films of 2016. Mungiu’s previous work Beyond the Hills (2012), which won two major awards at Cannes, was reviewed earlier on this blog. Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) is one of top 15 films of the 21^st century for the author. Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose (2013) is one of top 10 films of 2013 for the author.

162. Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer film “Pozitia copilului” (Child’s Pose) (2013): Selfish nature of relationships

A poster that reveals the structure of the film

Romanian cinema is on the march. In 2005, Romania gave the world the lovely, realistic film The Death of Mr Lazarescu. In 2012, that country followed up with the powerful movie Beyond the Hills, (which scooped up the Best Actress award for the two leading lady thespians in the movie and the best screenplay award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and the Best Film award at the Chicago Film Festival soon after). A year later, yet another fascinating work, Child’s Pose, won the coveted the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival.

The three films are by three different directors but all three have common factors—each of these are critical social essays on life in post-Communist Romania that will resound well with scenarios that are universal. All the three films provide a mighty cinematic punch delivered at the end to make a viewer think and reflect on what preceded the unusual, abrupt end-sequence.  These seemingly abrupt ends are well-crafted to provide an unconventional entertainment for an intelligent viewer.  That is what makes the new Romanian cinema distinct from others—the filmmakers provide you with endings of the narratives that are real enough for the viewer to identify with real situations that they themselves might have experienced in real life, not necessarily in a post-Communist country. And all three films are prisms that exude different colors on the selfish nature of relationships—the relationships of hospital workers towards seemingly anonymous patients in one, the relationships of a dumb but devout Christian priest wanting acceptance of his church and the innocent nuns under his well-meaning care by higher religious authorities after being ignored time and time again, and relationships of a mother clinging to her only progeny and the only individual she has truly controlled and wants to control forever.

"He is a good boy" appeals Cornelia 

In Child’s Pose, the intelligent director Calin Peter Netzer and his talented co-scriptwriter Razvan Radulescu, deal with a 60-year-old mother’s (Cornelia’s) relationship with a grown-up son (Barbu) in his early thirties. In this mother’s case, he happens to be her sole offspring.  Mothers in such situations do tend to be protective to a fault. But Netzer’s film takes the viewer on an unusual study of the relationship, when a perceptive viewer is forced to evaluate the selfishness in all relationships provided in the movie, to levels beyond the mother-son relationship that is so pivotal for this film.

Barbu has accidentally killed a kid on the road while driving his car at a rash speed and Cornelia tries to rescue Barbu from a likely jail term for manslaughter, with all the resources she can muster. Now any mother would do just that. But this film takes the viewer beyond the knee-jerk reaction of a doting, well-placed. architect mother. It’s a mother who loves to control everyone around her--her husband, her son Barbu (even when he is 30-something and ought to be left alone), her son Barbu’s girl friend Carmen, Barbu’s servant maid (when Barbu is not present), her well-connected and influential social and political network, the list goes on and on.  Cornelia’s husband hates her penchant to control him and everyone else and spitefully calls Cornelia, “Controlia.” Cornelia is able to partly achieve this because she is rich, she is well-read to score points in social conversation (she has apparently read the works of recent Nobel Prize winners for literature—Orhan Pamuk and Herta Muller—which she wants her son Barbu to read to improve his own social and intellectual standing) and she is dogged about her unethical purposes in life. Evidently, Pamuk’s and Muller’s writings have not impacted Cornelia in her personal life. Even Carmen’s relationship with Cornelia appears selfish—she hates her but supports her in her effort to help Barbu because she needs Barbu. Barbu, too, does not seem to reciprocate the love of his doting mother; he goes to the extent of rebuking her. A hypochondriac, Barbu, selfishly uses his mother without ever acknowledging her motherly love. He wants to be independent of her but is too much of a coward.

Luminita Gheorghiu as the rich and possessive mother Cornelia

In the second half of the film, the scriptwriters provide two interesting perspectives—one of Cornelia trying to resolve the issues on hand even with a clever show of grief to the mourning family and another of the cowardly Barbu sitting in the car leaving his mother to resolve the issues. The intriguing title of the film in English provides much food for thought. Without disclosing the interesting end of the film, it is without doubt a thoroughly intelligent film with a great screenplay, acting and direction. 

The scriptwriters of this film, as is the case of the other two new wave Romanian films mentioned earlier as well, explore relationships beyond the nuclear family. In Child’s Pose, while the main tale revolves around mother-son-father-and the son’s girlfriend—the scriptwriters compare and contrast this family with that of the killed kid. Of course, there is a contrast in the social status of the two families. The killed boy belongs to the less affluent Romania. It is a family so poor that would find it difficult to pay the costs of the funeral of their son—even Cornelia’s friends in the police suggest that she offer to bear the costs and buy the goodwill of the aggrieved party. In The Death of Mr Lazarescu, the fragile nature of nuclear families is dealt with early in the film as Lazarescu explains that his only progeny, a daughter, has migrated to Canada, his wife is probably dead, while his sister (his only relative left in Romania) is only selfishly  anxious  for the money he sends her from time to time. In Beyond the Hills, the nuclear family is dealt with as an aside to the principal tale of the two orphans. In that film, one of the two orphans is adopted by a nuclear family not out of love for the girl but more for the state’s financial support that comes along with that action.

Cowardly 30-year old Barbu, wanting to break free of a domineering mother

There is an incredible common factor for all the three films—the amazing actress Luminita Gheorghiu who plays personalities diametrically different in Child’s Pose and in The Death of Mr Lazarescu—one personality that is an epitome of money-power and selfishness, and the other that is extremely commendable one of utter unselfishness, caring for a sick, elderly stranger. In Beyond the Hills, she plays the minor role of the foster mother not interested in her ward as much as the pecuniary benefits the adoption offers. Ms Gheorghiu, incidentally,  was picked by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke to star in his 2000 film Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys.

There is a resurgence in Romanian cinema after decades of unimpressive works save for occasional gems like Iakob (Jacob) (1988) directed by Mircea Daneliu. The resurgence is essentially because of the outstanding talents of a handful of individuals who have been common factors contributing significantly to it. Leading the pack is Razvan Radulescu, a scriptwriter who contributed to the prominent works The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and now Child’s Pose (2013). Then there is the talented directors Cristi Puiu [who directed The Death of Mr Lazarescu and Aurora (2010)] and Cristian Mungiu (who gave us 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Beyond the Hills). Finally, there is actress Luminita Gheorghiu who plays the pivotal roles in The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Beyond the Hills, Aurora, and Child’s Pose.  These four individuals appear to be the main drivers of change in the quality of Romanian cinema along with a group of supporting actors and crew who have also lent their hands to this surge of creativity. One wishes that Romanian cinema continues to make such interesting works of art in the future as well. 

P.S.  Child’s Pose is on the author’s list of his the top 10 films of 2013. The two other Romanian films The Death of Mr Lazarescu and Beyond the Hills, mentioned extensively in this review, have been reviewed earlier on this blog

139. Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s “Dupa dealuri" (Beyond the Hills) (2012): Beyond the obvious

Romanian cinema produces fascinating movies from time to time. Beyond the Hills is one of them.  There are several reasons why this film is remarkable.

First, it is amazing to have a film with two women, who have never acted in a movie before, to face the cameras and do a job that is so convincing on screen that they both walk away with the prestigious Best Actress Award at Cannes Film Festival, 2012. So what, a cynic could exclaim.  The fact remains that the two ladies won the award when they were competing  against a rather outstanding performance of Ms Emanuelle Riva in Amour (Love), a rare performance that even the American Oscars felt worthy of nominating for the Best Actress Oscar, even though Ms Riva was performing in a movie in a foreign language.

The postures tell a tale of award-winning performances

The two Romanian actresses in Beyond the Hills are Cosmina Stratan (playing an angelic nun named Voichita) and Cristina Flutur (playing a not-so-religious and emotionally unstable Alina). These two can glue the viewer to the screen for the entire duration of the movie but the credit for their outstanding performances truly goes to their director Cristian Mungiu.  In an interview for New York Times, Mungui stated “We rehearsed a lot during casting, read a lot, and I acted a lot for them, so I am giving them directly the tone of voice, the energy, the rhythm, the body language that I want. Guidance, but not with words. I’m not telling them what to do, I show them how to do. But it’s fair to say that by the end, I had adapted as much to them as they adapted to me. We did what was there in the script, but each time it wasn’t possible to get the dialogue exactly right, I was adapting what I wanted to do and editing the scene to what they could do. Because you can’t push onto the actors something that does not belong to them.”  This is what this critic believes contrasts the performance of Ms Riva in Amour versus the Romanian actresses in Beyond the Hills, the difference between the effort of an amateur and a professional. And yet the amateur can perform well under the right mentor—in this case, the director Mungiu.

Second, Beyond the Hills is important cinema not just because of the acting of the two budding actresses who grabbed the Cannes center stage for their undeniable achievement in acting but because of the unmistakable strength of Mungiu’s screenplay in the film (which incidentally won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes festival for the director).  The story of the film ostensibly is based on a true life incident in Romania picked up by a journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran and later turned into a “non-fiction” novel by Bran. Now Bran apparently brought to light a bizarre set of real incidents in a small Christian Orthodox monastery where a girl dies following an “exorcism” done by a group of not-so-educated nuns and a priest. Mungiu’s amazing screenplay takes Bran’s journalism and a subsequent novel to a different plane beyond the incidents. The film asks the viewer the most discomforting and an important unspoken question “Who is responsible?” which is underscored by the final shot of the film of the windscreen wiper following a seemingly innocent conversation between two policemen in a closed vehicle.

Questioning the status quo

The simplistic answer to the “who is responsible” question for many viewers would be the nuns and the priest, belonging to the Orthodox Church living in Moldavia in the twentieth century post-Communist Romania who carried out the exorcism in their blind belief that what they were doing was right, just as the Catholic Church committed atrocities during the days of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century in Iberia. Yet Mungiu’s script is actually neutral towards the Church. It does not condemn the pious but it condemns a host of ills within the Romanian social fabric. It condemns isolation from development in various spheres, including the world of medical care and the rehabilitation of orphans, religious and atheist and the general lack of education of the denizens of the monastery. 

Beyond the Hills encourages the viewer to ask questions on blind acceptance of priests (of all religions by the extension of this particular vivid example) and their interpretation of religion, the dangers of well-meaning people wanting all to fall in with a particular priest’s line of thought, which actually is a reflection of the Communist mindset that the Romanian people endured for decades.  The director Cristian Mungiu in an interview to Indiewire with journalist Christopher Bell said: “I always try to get inspired by life itself and by things I see happening close to me. The film deals with two different ways of understanding love, about abuse, and about what people are asked to do in the name of love. And hopefully it speaks about this desire we all have whenever we make decisions – we hope we make them with our own heads and not in the name of any kind of ideology which can be extreme. It's one thing where you give people the freedom to decide, but to keep them in the state of mind where they think they don't have information, they don't get education. They are free but don't have the means to make the proper decisions. I don't think communism stopped in 1989, it stopped then as a political system but the consequences will be around for a long while."

Third, the script of Beyond the Hills will bring to the mind of an avid film viewer another film made 10 years ago—the Irish director Peter Mullan’s film The Magdalene Sisters (2002), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival that year. Now both Mullan’s film and Mungiu’s film have common threads. Mullan made the Irish film based on his own script just as Mungiu’s work. Mullen’s film ostensibly relates to the Roman Catholic Church, while Mungiu’s movie deals with a monastery run by an Orthodox Christian priest, facing problems with his own Church leaders.  Both films hark back to real life incidents. Mullan’s film was made because Mullen felt victims of Magdalene Asylums had no closure and had had not received any recognition, compensation, or apology, though the victims remained lifelong devout Catholics.

Happiness with the status quo

The moot point both films raise is beyond religion. Even though the events and setting of the stories are definitely religious, both directors point fingers at the society that blindly follow religion. In The Magdalene Sisters, any Catholic girl who is raped and becomes pregnant out of marriage is considered "unacceptable" by society and the girls' parents force them to become nuns (the Magdalene sisters) that offer only a world of strict discipline without any exposure to the outside world. In Beyond the Hills, the acceptance of becoming a nun is assumed to be less forced by society and more of an individual choice—though the choice is an outcome of lack of education that there are options to lead a life other than that of a nunnery. In Beyond the Hills, the two orphan women who take the center stage of the movie, brought up together, seem to have had options. One chose to be a devout nun: another to live with a foster family outside the religious confines.

While the film Beyond the Hills seems to be focused on the events that take place within the monastery, Mungiu’s screenplay explores the mindsets of two sets of doctors/medical fraternity in Romania today, one before the death of the girl and one after the death.  Mungiu's screenplay deals with how an unfortunate orphan is dealt by doctors and by a family who seek to make money out of civil laws that financially help such foster families. The evocative but silent reaction of the dead girl’s brother when informed of his sister’s death is one of the striking scenes of the movie. Mungiu’s interesting screenplay finally settles down to the reaction of the policemen towards the end of the movie. The end of the film might appear to be abrupt, but the windscreen wiper’s inanimate action clearing the dirt splashed on the windshield is a lovely figurative comment on the film’s preceding tale and the shocking conversation between the two policemen about another recent killing in Romania that had nothing to do with religion or religious people.

Finally, the movie is essentially a tale of an individual against a larger group, where the individual loses out. Here, the individual is relatively more educated because she has been exposed to certain options to choose from, whether acceptable or unacceptable to the viewers, and this individual faces a well-intentioned but uneducated group cloistered in old ways, cut off from the world outside. In yet another interesting perspective, the film offers a love triangle involving two orphan girls and God, where predictably the loser is one of the girls. Beyond the Hills, just as the title of the film suggests, lets the viewer look at options beyond the impediments that obstructs one’s vision. Mungiu is not questioning God, he is questioning social controls, just as Mullen seeks an apology from the Church and society for lifelong devout Catholics who had to spend years of suffering just because they were raped and hence not acceptable to Irish society. But Mungiu’s cinema offers a fascinating and seemingly “abrupt” end to a rather long film without external music. And it is the unusual final sequences, which actually contribute to the movie's inherent strength. 

The recent Romanian films Beyond the Hills and Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) are entertaining examples of social criticism that combines well with superb acting performances and intelligent screenplays.

P.S. Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu was reviewed on this blog earlier. Beyond the Hills is one of the top 10 films of 2012 for the author.

120. Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s “Moartea domnului Lazarescu” (The Death of Mr Lazarescu) (2005): Loving thy neighbour as thyself

No Romanian film that this writer has seen has been as honest, as gripping, and as well crafted as Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu. It bolsters the credibility of Romanian cinema, which has traditionally lagged behind the rich cinematic products of the former USSR (e.g., Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, Kozintsev), of Hungary (e.g., Fabri, Szabo), of Poland (e.g., Kieslowski, Wajda) and even of the former Czechoslovakia (e.g., Forman, Kadar, Trnka). For the Romanian viewer, this movie could touch a raw nerve that relates to the true state of Romanian hospitals, the attitudes of their medical staff and their ability to care for the sick and elderly slice of the Romanian population. It is indeed a societal and psychological study of the varied behaviour patterns of emergency room staff under stress. From this viewer's perspective, the film's tale could easily extrapolate a similar situation anywhere on this planet—in a rich developed country or in a poor developing country. The film transcends man-made boundaries. It is a tale of gradual loss of independence as one’s health deteriorates. It is indeed a degrading experience when one wishes for the proximity of their dear ones.

All of us assume that if we have a medical emergency someone would rush us to an emergency room of a hospital where our ailment would get immediate and due attention. But what if we have that unfortunate requirement shortly after a major accident (or for that matter, a terrorist attack, or a fire, or a building collapse) near the hospital and we reach the hospital emergency room when every worker at the hospital is stretched to the limit. If you subscribe to Murphy’s law that ‘if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong,’ this movie is for you to appreciate and reflect on its amazing contents.

Director Puiu’s film The Death of Mr Lazarescu has won at least 24 awards, including the prestigious Prize of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, the Golden Swan at the Copenhagen Film Festival, and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. Interestingly, this is the first of six films the director intends to make that revolve around Bucharest and its environs, each a treatise on love, this one being a film dealing with love for fellow men. The other five are to be films on (a) love between a man and a woman, (b) love for one’s children, (c) love for success, (d) love between friends, and (e) carnal love. Is this Romania’s answer to the Polish genius Kieslowski’s Dekalog, which had each of its 10 episodes devoted to one of the Ten Commandments? I do hope it is. (His second film Aurora, in this proposed series of six films, has been made in 2010 and screened at the Cannes Film Festival but this writer has yet to view it.)

Puiu and his co-scriptwriter Razvan Radelescu developed a fascinating yet dour character they call Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu. That name is heavy with allusions. Dante, we know, is associated with the famous writer Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) who wrote The Divine Comedy describing man’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Remus, we know, is associated with Romulus and Remus, the two mythical shepherds who are credited to have built the city of Rome. Now Remus was killed by Romulus and his henchmen for leaping over a wall built by Romulus, but some writers alternately suggest Remus died from natural causes, and not killed. But eventually Romulus went on to bury Remus with pomp and regret. The name Lazarescu would recall the two distinct Lazaruses mentioned in the Bible associated with the Gospels—one is a Lazarus who is raised from the dead by Jesus and the other is a Lazarus who is poor and sick, and lives off the crumbs of a rich man's table, eventually dying to reach heaven while the rich man goes to hell. Imagine mixing all these details to weave a single character in the film, which interestingly is not about Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu or his death but about his last days on earth. The movie is about how others deal with him and how one person decides to take care of a stranger who needs help. Yet each element of this unusual name is important to appreciate the depth of the film’s script.

Mr Lazarescu of Puiu’s film is an average human being, not very rich, not very poor, living alone in a small apartment with cats as his only company. He is probably living a retired life. His wife is either dead or has left him. His only progeny, a daughter, has married and migrated to another country, Canada. His closest kin is a sister who lives in another town and is an eager recipient of some money he sends from time to time. We learn that he had been operated for an ulcer in his stomach.  His young neighbours in the apartment building hate his cats and have very little time for him as they are immersed in their daily chores. Mr Lazarescu’s only “friend,” other than his cats, is his bottle of liquor. Inevitably, when Mr Lazarescu has a severe and persisting headache and is vomiting blood even after taking some pills available in his apartment and his neighbour’s apartment, he is stinking of liquor. However, the interesting script of Puiu and Radelescu adds an interesting detail: Mr Lazarescu, in spite of his pain, loneliness, and his awareness that he needs urgent medical help, worries about feeding his cats and sending money to his sister who desperately needs it. But how do people deal with such an individual in that condition? That is the core structure of Puiu’s cinematic essay, not so much the conditions of emergency rooms in hospitals.

As Mr Lazarescu awaits his ambulance to arrive, his neighbours do provide minimal succour of providing him a pill for headaches and even offers a bite to eat. When the ambulance and its paramedic appears on the scene, the neighbours cry off the responsibility of accompanying Mr Lazarescu to the hospital—their priorities lie elsewhere. It is the paramedic who has never met Mr Lazarescu before, who realizes he has no one to care for him. It is the paramedic who decides that he needs urgent medical attention (after having made an interesting medical diagnosis through her years of experience rather than medical studies), who takes his papers, and who accompanies the sick man the entire night. But on that fateful night, just before Mr Lazarescu    reaches the first hospital, the emergency room has its hands full, dealing with scores of other equally critical patients as a result of a bus accident. 

What ensues later are a series of encounters between doctors of all hues and the paramedic accompanying the patient. There are tired doctors, irascible doctors, egoistic doctors, caring, empathetic doctors, doctors sexually attracted to other doctors, doctors with dark humour, doctors who go by the rulebook and not common sense, doctors who use every trick they know to get another doctor to attend on a serious patient, and even brilliant doctors who can diagnose the condition of the patient with alacrity, all quilted and sketched out with remarkable credibility that makes the viewer wonder if the movie has indeed transformed from fiction into a documentary.

A powerful subplot of the film involves the stand-offs between qualified specialist doctors and the less qualified paramedics. It is interesting to note the intolerance of the educated towards well meaning less-educated individuals with lots of experience. Also captured by the lovely script is the intolerance of doctors towards a sick patient smelling of liquor and having a sharp tongue.

Many viewers noting the similarity of the names Lazarus and Lazarescu might expect this movie to be about death or even surviving death. The film is not about either of those scenarios. The film is about how people react to situations where a person is nearing the end of one's life and how we behave towards such individuals in such situations. Lazarescu’s life might have been saved if one of the doctors saw the urgency of his medical condition and did not toss the patient to the next convenient hospital to reduce work load and offload accountability. The film might show the emergency room and the pressures of that environment. But it is actually a film that asks the viewer to look at ourselves and our behaviour towards others. Only one individual, the paramedic goes out of the way to help a stricken stranger, even when she knows from experience it is a no-win situation. Yet, she extends a hand in help to a man without any kin, just as she would care for a family member, asking no reward for doing so.

That brings us back to the name of Dante Remus Lazarescu. Who is the "Lazarus" here? One realizes the parallels in the movie are more related to the Lazarus, the beggar with sores eating off the crumbs of the rich man’s table (read emergency room of hospitals). Who is the "Remus" here? One recalls the fable of the creator of Rome and one might see the parallels with Remus who was killed but officially considered to have died a natural death. Did the lack of love in the emergency rooms kill "Remus" Lazarescu, which would eventually be labelled as natural death.  Who is "Dante" here? Lazarescu appears in this film progressing through “Hell” of the Divine Comedy. Comedy, you ask? What can you say of doctors who insist on a signature on a form to absolve the doctors from blame by a dying man, who is not in his senses, before conducting a major operation? The film is supposed to be based on actual events; yet the name of the dying man decided by the filmmakers is not without substance.  

This notable Romanian film does not merely rely on the strong script but a bravura acting performance of the entire cast. The flawless performances of each player in the film are astounding. The viewer begins to feel that these are real people--such is the effect of the film. At the end of the film there is silence as the patient is ready for the operation and is left alone. The film does not have to state anything further. What the film had to state has been eloquently said already. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet stated with his powerful final words: “The rest is silence.”

P.S. Two segments of Kieslowski's ten-part Dekalog have been reviewed earlier on this blog. Dekalog part 5 deals with the Commandment "Thou shall not kill" and  Dekalog part 7 deals with the Commandment "Thou shalt not steal." The Death of Mr Lazarescu is among the author's top 15 films of the 21st century.