On the Road in Romania --
With a Dying Man
With a Dying Man
By HELEN CHANG
June 30, 2006
June 30, 2006
Romanian director Cristi Puiu won critical acclaim last year with "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" -- the story of an old man shuffled from hospital to hospital until tragedy
ensues. In the film, Dante Remus Lazarescu, who calls three cats his only companions, manages to win us over despite his booze breath, his unkempt clothing and tart replies -- though unfortunately, never the hospital staff.
The lanky and intense Mr. Puiu is at work on a six-film series, of which "Lazarescu" was the first. The series contemplates different loves -- the love in a friendship, for instance, or the love between a man and woman -- and is in homage to French director Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," which Mr. Puiu says he "cannot escape from." Each tale in Mr. Rohmer's series is molded from the same premise -- a man who is tempted by a woman other than his partner.
| Cristi Puiu |
Awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes last year, in addition to winning prizes from 35 other international festivals, "Lazarescu" has been distributed in Europe and the U.S. Next month, Tartan Films will release it in the U.K.
Like Mr. Puiu's previous works, including "Cigarettes and Coffee," which won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film in Berlin in 2004, most of the film takes place in confined spaces -- Mr. Lazarescu's apartment, the ambulance and the hospital. Mr. Puiu, 39 years old, calls it a road movie: a quiet, focused, sometimes funny and otherwise rage-inducing ambulance ride with a dying man.
In April, he talked with Helen Chang in his Bucharest studio about how he spent his military service making copies of
Russian paintings and why he won't ever leave Bucharest.
Q: In "Lazarescu," a dying man is ferried from hospital to hospital until it's too late. Is this something that could really happen in Bucharest?
You know, it did happen in Bucharest six years ago. Six hospitals refused the hospitalization of a patient during the night, and at the end, the paramedic decided to let the patient, this old man with tuberculosis, into the street. He died two hours later. No doctor was punished for this, just the paramedic, a girl in her last year of medical school who received eight years. And I was so revolted by the result of this trial, I started thinking of this status of being a patient in Romania. If you are [a patient] in Bucharest, you can say you are lucky. If something happens in the countryside, you are dead. But I think this story ["Lazarescu"] could happen anywhere, in England, in France.
Q: So
it's not strictly a Romanian tale, but a universal one.
First, it's about an individual, living in that community, and the fact that we die alone. From another point of view, it is a Romanian film because the characters are Romanian. When we showed this film in Cluj [in Transylvania], they got really excited. They said it was a very good depiction of the Bucharest mentality: It's tough, you have to fight, you have to do things very quickly. Still, anyone can discover in this film parts of his own behavior.
Q: Has your success changed things for you?
I'm really glad I got the prize and money. I'm lucky with this. (He holds his trophy.) We are renovating our apartment. The thing that I experience now with this film is that some people, even friends, have taken their distance. It is the fact that the success of somebody else is like a personal failure. But the success of somebody else is the
success of somebody else, and that's all. It is not your failure.
Q: What was the reaction to your film at home?
In Romania, let's face it, we have a lot of problems: health care, education, political climate, everything. So Romanians perceived it with this complex, this inferiority complex. This is not all the Romanians, but many of them perceived it with this complex, which makes the act of watching the film really painful.
Q: How did you get into film?
In fact, it was the summer of 1989 or 1990 that I discovered cinema is not just for entertainment. Under the communists, it was very difficult to find films because sometime in the '80s, they stopped bringing new films to Romania. But there was a circle of people very much interested in cinema, who brought films from abroad. My uncle was one of them. He gave me "Stranger than Paradise" by Jim Jarmusch, and at that
moment I discovered, wow, cinema can be this, too, not just Westerns.
Q: What were you doing around this time?
In '89 I went to the army to satisfy my military service. I did a special service because of my "bad record." I have an aunt living in England since '72, and when you have a member of your family living in an "imperialist, capitalist, an enemy country," you sort of become a potential counterrevolutionary. They invented this special service in order to use people like me to save money on construction. Some of us were working in coal mines or petrol fields, some of us on this House of the People.
Q: You helped build the second-largest building in the world?
It's what I was supposed to do, but I didn't, because I was good in painting. The chief of my division wanted to have a copy of an Ivan
Aivazovsky, the Russian painter. I began working in construction, but little by little, he discovered that I had this skill, so he first employed me to write things about communism on pieces of red glass or red material -- it had to be red to say that the communists will win -- and so on.
Q: How did you get from the army to the École Supérieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva?
After the downfall of [communist dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu, I finished the army in February 1990 and went home. The year 1990 was a turning point for me. That summer, I went to exhibit in Lausanne with friends of mine. This was a shock because I took a plane from dark, Romanian communism, and snap, I was in Switzerland. We went to Lausanne by car. And crossing this green Switzerland, it was really a shock for me, you cannot imagine.
Q: That's when you decided to
apply to school in Geneva?
Yes, because everybody then was sort of streaming out: People in my neighborhood, people within my circle of friends. In '90, '91, '92, it was really unstable here. Iliescu, who succeeded Ceausescu, called for the police and the army to stop student demonstrations against him. On the 14th of June in 1990, the miners arrived and it was a massacre. At that moment, lots of people received this status of refugee.
Q: Had you also considered making a life elsewhere than Bucharest at that point?
I am too much attached to this place. And meanwhile, I had a daughter who was just born; I didn't think of spending my life in Switzerland or France. Second, I wanted to make film, and the cinema I am doing is not a poetic cinema. It is very much related to what's happening around me.
Q:
Though one hardly sees this world, Bucharest, in your films. Mostly your shots are of these tight spaces.
In 2003, I received money for my short film [from the state's National Center of Cinema] although some of my colleagues didn't. So I started thinking of a way of making films in Romania. It had to be cheap. It meant working with people who come because they like the project. Here we used a three-camera spiel -- this form of filmmaking in the '20s and '30s in Germany. There are moments where the cameras are really moving, but otherwise, you have this apartment, this hospital...I'm very realistic. I think cinema for a country like Romania is a sort of luxury.
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