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Not to be missed, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu took the arthouse world by storm, coming in at #1 as best film of the year in the Indiewire poll of North American critics. Mr. Lazarescu (beautifully played by Ion Fiscuteanu, who recently died), a sixty-two-year-old alcoholic widower who lives alone in his grubby Bucharest flat with his three cats (his daughter has decamped for Toronto) suddenly feels very ill. The film's first half hour plays like grim social comedy, as his neighbours bustle about, blithely offering bad advice and inappropriate palliatives (a bowl of moussaka “made with pork, not beef”) for his deteriorating condition. When a paramedic (the amazing Luminita Gheorghiu, familiar from Michael Haneke's films) arrives to take him to the hospital, poor old Lazarescu begins a squalid odyssey from infirmary to infirmary, in search of someone who will give him the tests and attention he needs. Less a critique of the medical system than a teeming comédie humaine, Lazarescu offers a fresco of countless characters - haughty doctors, put-upon nurses, vexed patients, smart-ass lab technicians - all of them vividly rendered and splendidly acted. By turns funny, bitter, and moving, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu appears to be that rare thing: a contemporary classic. “The best film of the year” (Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine).
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