Old Yorker

  • The Death of Mr Lazarescu

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Moartea domnului Lazarescu

    Cristi Puiu (2005)

    4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, set in the last years of the Ceausescu regime, impressively balances recreation of the time and place with the creation of characters who are realised as people – as more than products of the particular setting.   The Death of Mr Lazarescu, the last Romanian film before 4 Months to achieve significant commercial as well as critical success in Western Europe and North America, is set in the present day;  but it shares this ability to make social and moral points without compromising the individuality of the people on the screen.  The plot is very simple:  Mr Lazarescu is a widower in his early sixties; he’s been suffering from a bad headache and sickness for several days; in the middle of one evening, he phones for an ambulance.  It takes time to arrive (real time in the film).  Once the ambulance – containing two paramedics and Lazarescu – sets off from the block of flats where he lives, the film becomes an odyssey, as a succession of Bucharest hospitals examine the elderly man and decide that he would be better off in a different hospital.  In the course of the night (the film ends in the early hours of the following morning) the patient’s condition deteriorates; a blood clot on the brain is diagnosed – as is terminal liver damage.

    As he drifts towards unconsciousness, what Lazarescu says – and of course he has to explain his symptoms repeatedly – makes less and less sense, to the doctors and nurses anyway.  The jumbled phrases make almost increasing sense to the audience:  we have been hearing about the illness from the point at which, although he may have drunk more than is good for him, Lazarescu is fully compos mentis.  The film – especially these exchanges with the medics – is extraordinarily well and sensitively written (by Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu).  In the middle of one of his verbal rambles, Lazarescu says, ‘It’s a question of mortality’.  This is perfectly convincing as a lone sentence that happens to make sense; because it’s convincing in this realistic way, it also conveys Puiu’s principal theme with tremendous force.   The film is about the ebbing away of an individual life, as well the deficiencies of a national health system;   those deficiencies are more shocking because you’re made so intensely aware that Mr Lazarescu is, as Philip Larkin describes his own impending death, ‘spiralling towards extinction’.   The Death of Mr Lazarescu runs 154 minutes but it’s so relentlessly absorbing that it feels long only because of the sympathy that you feel for Lazarescu’s endless wait for the right treatment.  Puiu is remarkably subtle in the way he alters our perception of who is the central consciousness.  The first fifteen minutes or so are virtually all Lazarescu (and the cats who share his apartment).  His neighbours are introduced, then the paramedics; gradually, Lazarescu and Mioara, the woman paramedic trying to find the right care for him, become a double act.  HeHHe gets more ill and less vocal and the point comes when you suddenly realise that she has become the heart of the story.  (You’re as outraged at her treatment by senior medics as you’re distressed that Lazarescu’s voyage threatens to have no ending.)   Finally, Mioara goes off duty – she and the ambulance driver disappear, taking the well-used (soiled) stretcher with them – and Lazarescu moves back into focus, as he is shaved, stripped and prepared for the operating theatre.

    Cristi Puiu’s achievement in presenting characters as trapped in their situation but not defined by it is perhaps most brilliant in his depiction of the various hospital staff.   When they’re introduced into the story, you’re nearly always struck by their brusqueness and lack of kindness (this includes even Mioara’s first appearance); then, in most cases (there are two rebarbative exceptions), they say things and reveal facets that complicate them; their behaviour is made, if not likeable, at least understandable – it becomes not just hard to condemn them but difficult to be sure how else they could behave, in their working circumstances.  As a result, Mr Lazarescu is able to offer a much more powerful critique of public health care than would be possible if the doctors and nurses were shown as simply, heroically battling against inadequate resources.  Most of the hospital staff are not unconcerned about Lazarescu but humaneness is severely rationed; you get the sense that they have to develop distancing strategies to keep sane and keep the service running at all.  There’s next to nothing in the script and direction that’s surplus to requirements.  Puiu is highly aware of his ingredients and does different and resonant things with them:  for example, Lazarescu is accused of being a drunk by most of those he encounters but the last reference to alcohol – as it’s applied to his shaven head before his operation – has an ironically sacral quality.  Perhaps, though, the protagonist’s names – Dante Remus Lazarescu, repeated at each new port of call – are a bit too symbolically suggestive for the film’s good.  (There are also references to a character called Virgil.)

    The performances in the two main parts are almost beyond praise (and many of those in the supporting cast are very fine too).   You never catch these actors acting – yet they’re never submerged in documentary.   Ioan Fiscuteanu is a heavy-set figure; his obdurate masculinity gives a sustained astringency – and a very distinctive pathos – to Lazarescu’s decline.  The real name of the actress playing Mioara is even more appropriately symbolic than that of the eponymous hero.   She is called Luminita Gheorghiu and she is luminously expressive.   Mioara doesn’t stay with Lazarescu purely because she’s altruistic and loyal;   she has a strong sense of what she thinks is right but she’s also bloody-minded.  She’s only a few years younger than her patient; she’s not in great physical health herself (and she sometimes lets the hospital staff know that).    There is an amazing moment in the ambulance when Gheorghiu lets you see the warring questions in Mioara’s head.  How did I get into this situation?  How can I stand it any longer?   How can I leave him?

    15 October 2008

  • Love Like Poison

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Un poison violent

    Katell Quillévéré  (2010)

    Love Like Poison is about the tensions between religion and carnality.  Not a new theme but this first feature – Katell Quillévéré also wrote the screenplay, with Mariette Désert – combines emotional texture and detail with such skilful concentration that the material feels freshly realised.  The contest between moral obligation and sexual desire is focused chiefly on fourteen-year-old Anna (Clara Augarde), who’s home, from boarding school, in the Brittany village where her family lives and where Anna is preparing for her confirmation in the Catholic Church.  But the contest is taking place too in the lives of the most important adults in her world:  her churchgoing mother Jeanne (Lio); her non-believer father Paul (Thierry Neuvic), who’s having an affair and has recently moved out of the family home; his bedridden father Jean (Michel Galabru), who still lives there; the parish priest Père François (Stefano Cassetti).   Although he’s in the church choir, there isn’t much conflict of this kind in the mind of the fresh-faced Pierre (Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil):  a little younger than Anna, he’s increasingly curious about her body (as she, more self-consciously, is about his) but he’s blithely unspiritual.  Yet each of the other principal characters – although some of them share Pierre’s godlessness – is troubled by sexual needs of one kind or another.   When Anna is washing her grandfather, he says smilingly, ‘I feel handsome’:  she’s shocked to realise there’s an erection under his pyjama trousers, and he’s sorry he’s shocked her.  Her father is certainly debonair compared with Anna’s hyper-tense mother but Paul’s shadow movements and eyes give away his guilty conscience.  (A scene between father and daughter on the beach is perfectly played; it makes Paul’s brittle emotionality in later scenes all the more startling.)  As for Jeanne, it’s clear she’s attracted to Père François as more than a spiritual comforter.

    All the actors concerned are excellent and comparing the various pairs in this sextet is continuously interesting but it seemed to me that, apart from Anna, the most important, and certainly the most powerful, character was the priest.   Anna, developing physically and sexually, is already growing out of God.  Père François – an Italian by birth (Jeanne helped him learn French when he first came to Brittany) – is poised between two worlds.  In the early stages of the film, his religious vocation looks to be a fact of life:  it never ceases to be unignorable but François’s psychology is revealed to be more complicated.  You first sense that part of him would prefer to live entirely in the present when he’s persuaded to kick a football around with the local boys.  It’s typical of Katell Quillévéré’s attention to detail that she dresses François in increasingly casual clothes as the film progresses.  Like his clerical garb, his thick-lensed, steel-framed spectacles create a superficial impression of moral austerity, even humourlessness, but the vivid light blue eyes behind them impose themselves more and more.   Under Quillévéré’s sympathetic direction, Stefano Cassetti gives a superbly subtle performance.  His carefully affectionate gesture when he consoles Anna in one scene anticipates the much more difficult act of self-control required of him in a later one with Jeanne:  both are beautifully judged.  It’s when we see the skull-faced, desiccated bishop who conducts the confirmation service – using the words of St Paul to inveigh against sexuality, watched by the uncertain, sensually vital faces of the children being confirmed – that we fully realise the dual nature of Père François.

    Attending the funeral of Pierre’s grandmother early in the film, Anna faints as the coffin is lowered into the ground and Père François recites the hope of resurrection.  She does the same when confronted by the bishop, just as he’s about to confirm her.  These rare moments of melodrama are cleverly placed:  they make Love Like Poison more eventful; and they’re convincing because they may (or may not) be willed by the girl.  Anna is almost precociously well developed for her age: she already has largish breasts.  (In a conversation with her mother, Anna asks what sort of breasts her father likes and Jeanne replies, with a quietly bitter mixture of ruefulness and assertiveness, ‘Breasts like mine – or that’s what he said once’.)  Although she’s emotionally confused and vulnerable, Anna’s intellectual equipment is pretty advanced too (believably so).  As she starts to get some distance from her Catholic obligations, she behaves with growing, shrewd daring.   After the debacle of the confirmation service, she goes to her grandfather’s room in the middle of the night and lifts her nightdress.   He dies shortly afterwards – we assume a happy man, not just because of this but because he’s no longer parted from his late, beloved wife.  At his funeral, Anna reads a piece in his memory, a counterpoint to the bishop’s reading from Galatians.  It’s from the Song of Songs – erotic but, as Anna realises, irreproachable since it’s from the Bible.

    The film takes its (French) title from a Serge Gainsbourg song but the music for the most part, although this is an unusual and eclectic soundtrack, isn’t its most successful aspect.   A tenor (verging on countertenor) voice sings ‘Greensleeves’, etc.  Children perform songs in church choir arrangements (including a Radiohead number over the closing credits).    Of course, these pick up Quillévéré’s themes of innocence on the cusp of sexuality and denatured maleness but they do so too neatly and artfully.  This is a minor criticism, though – one that certainly doesn’t carry much weight beside Clara Augarde’s blend of radiance and truculence as Anna.  Katell Quillévéré directs her sensitively so that we’re always conscious of the fine balance between self-awareness and innocence in Anna – and in the young actress playing her.

    15 May 2011

     

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