OFFScreen Presents

Death of Mr. Lazarescu -
Sunday, Sept. 10 - 7 & 930 pm - 150 mins
Dir. Cristi Puiu - Romania, 2005



Review from the N.Y. Times, Sept. 24, 2005:

New York Film Festival Reviews; The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

By MANOHLA DARGIS

There are nine circles of hell in Dante's inferno and five in Cristi Puiu's film ''The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,'' a harrowing vision of a solitary soul who embarks on a journey into the diseased soul of his fellow man. After the title character, an ashen Hungarian intellectual (Ion Fiscuteanu), takes ill, he reaches out to those who might offer a helping hand. Initially tended to by his bumbling neighbors -- a woman brings the vomiting man a bowl of moussaka -- Mr. Lazarescu enters the grudging care of a recalcitrant paramedic. Together, the two become partners on a voyage that takes them to various hospitals, purgatories of indifference that should carry the legend ''Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'' Shot through with biting humor and filmed with quasidocumentary intimacy, this affecting story depicts a society that, in its inability to tend to its weakest members, betrays its own ill health, which sounds awfully familiar in these post-Katrina times.

View the trailer