What Is So Funny about The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu?

Abstract

won prestigious prizes at major festivals and film critics hailed the emergence of a "New Wave." 1 Puiu's internationally acclaimed The Death of Mr. L az arescu (2005) is arguably the first to start this new cinematic wave with an exploration of human interactions played out in a bankrupt medical system. The film follows Dante Remus L az arescu (Ioan Fiscuteanu), a retired sexagenarian widower, who lives alone in an apartment complex where he spends his lonely days watching television, talking to his cats, and drinking a steady flow of homemade drinks. Feeling ill one evening, L az arescu calls the ambulance after attempting to self-medicate with alcohol and over-the-counter drugs. The paramedic's arrival sets off a long journey from one emergency room to the next, as doctors examine L az arescu perfunctorily, dismiss him as a drunkard, and refuse to hospitalize him. When he turns comatose in the ambulance, a medic finally checks him into a hospital. The film closes with his naked and shaved body waiting for surgery in an empty hospital room.While the plotline reveals a drama, the movie also provokes laughter and smiles, which inspired its international promotion as a dark comedy. It is a truism that humor is both universal and contextual: while we all laugh, we do not all laugh at the same things, or in the same ways. Laughter gives expression to a breadth of emotions ranging from acceptance and joy to anxiety or derision. It expresses attitudes toward the world and its challenges that run from full trust and optimism to suspicion and profound cynicism. This essay is an exploration of the film's uses of humor to dramatize anxiety and disengagement as defining attitudes in postsocialism. I argue that The Death foregrounds wooden language, a socialist idiom of submission to power born out of anxiety, as the facilitator of disengagement. It illustrates how mannerisms of socialist talk continue to shape contemporary society and provide refuge from responsibility. Puiu's film painstakingly documents the journey of "Mr. L az arescu" from the private sphere of family relations into the public one of neighborly and institutional interactions, as he repeatedly falls out of others' care into what the title of the film announces, his death. Heavy reliance on crowded medium shots, harsh low key lighting available on location, and the use of hand-held cameras realistically construct an entropic universe of wooden formulas, gestures, and emotions where death is not an abstract event, but a concrete inevitability.