The Death of Mr. Lazarescu · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He starts the night upright. Mr. Lăzărescu shuffles around his cluttered flat, feeds the cats, presses a hand to his stomach, pours himself a drink, telephones for an ambulance. He is irritable, a little funny, and entirely a person with intentions: he wants the pain to stop, he wants someone to come. This is a man who still acts. By the last hospital he is a shaved head on a gurney, no longer able to say his own name, wheeled through one more set of doors. The film is the long lateral distance between those two states, and it insists on measuring that distance in something close to real time.

Deleuze had a name for what crosses that distance, though he died a decade before Puiu shot a frame of it. He called it the crisis of the action-image. In ordinary cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to change it — pain, then diagnosis, then cure; threat, then rescue. The cut serves that circuit. Watch what Puiu does instead. The dossier puts it exactly: as Lăzărescu worsens, 'he speaks less and is acted upon more,' and Fiscuteanu makes 'that subtraction of agency the spine of the role.' The sensory-motor link — I perceive, therefore I can do something — is severed at the center of the film and never repaired. That is not a flaw in the drama. It is the drama.

Once action drops out, what fills the screen is what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns. A character, and we with him, can only look and listen; nothing can be done with what is seen. Puiu engineers this materially. There is no score to tell us how to feel, only the diegetic night: sirens, the ambulance idling, television murmur, staff chatter spoken over the patient. Oleg Mutu's handheld camera 'behaves like an attentive bystander,' adopting 'no privileged vantage,' refusing to cut to the doctors' point of view to explain or excuse them. Stripped of music and montage, the image stops doing our moral work. We are left, in Deleuze's word, as seers — and the film hands that role to Mioara the paramedic, weary and dogged, 'the only person treating Lăzărescu as a person.' She mostly cannot fix anything. She can only keep watching, which the film proposes as the last available form of care.

This is where impatience tends to set in — nothing happens, he just gets passed along — and the impatience is the point. The structure is a voyage that transforms nothing: a one-night odyssey through four hospitals that 'moves laterally, not toward resolution.' Each stop repeats the pattern — intake, suspicion, partial diagnosis, deferral, transfer — with fresh personnel every time. Deleuze would recognize the dispersive situation and its weak links: many loosely connected figures, slackened causality, an episodic drift where the next scene doesn't so much follow from the last as start the cycle again with new faces. The recurring snag is devastatingly small. The staff smell drink on him and read him as an unworthy patient. The same body is legible two opposite ways at once — dying man, or drunk who has wasted everyone's time — an index of equivocity that the institution resolves, fatally, in the wrong direction, hospital after hospital.

And because action has emptied out, the body itself becomes the film's true text. This is cinema of the body: duration carried not by deeds but by posture, the gurney that becomes Lăzărescu's fixed position, the paperwork passed hand to hand, the signatures demanded over an incoherent man. Repeatedly the staff perform what Deleuze called the gest — an attitude that exposes a whole social relation in a single bearing. They speak about him in his presence, across him, never to him. You don't need the dialogue to read it; the blocking says it. The institution is staged as 'a continuous, populated world that does not pause for Lăzărescu's emergency,' and that ambient busyness at the edges of frame is the indifference, made physical.

None of this fell from the sky. Puiu is working a vein Bazin first dignified and Deleuze later theorized: the postwar realism where the action-image cracks. Umberto D. built a drama from an old man's bodily indignity and the slow administrative shrug around him; Wiseman's Hospital found the structure already lying in the fluorescent corridors and the procedural waiting; Pialat's La Gueule ouverte refused score and uplift so that a body's decline could register as plain duration. Puiu narrativizes all of it into one night, then compresses Tarr's elapsed-time-as-subject into a span you can sit through at a sitting. What he adds is the comic register — the deadpan so close to documentary behavior that horror and farce become 'indistinguishable.'

The debt runs forward too. Mutu's sour, equal-attention handheld here becomes the New Wave's signature; he carries it straight into 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and Puiu's win at Cannes converts a few scattered Romanian successes into a recognized wave with real money behind it. The lesson the wave took was Deleuze's, even unspoken: that you can build a rigorous film out of a man who can no longer act, by making duration itself a moral instrument. The title forecloses the suspense on purpose. With 'will he live?' removed, a harder question opens — through whose hands, exactly, does a man die unattended in a system built to save him? — and the film refuses to answer it for you. Watch it again and you'll catch yourself doing what Mioara does. Just looking. Counting the hours. Sorting the small cruelties from the small kindnesses, which turns out to be the whole of the night.