Recommended

THIS IS THE END: Mr. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) goes crankily into that good night.

The movie's center, of course, is Dante Remus Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu), a slovenly, booze-pickled widower whose nagging head and stomach pains soon reveal the presence of life-threatening ailments. But even as Lazarescu progresses toward his foreordained doom, bits of other people's lives keep shoving their way into his story. As he lies on his filth-stained couch waiting for the ambulance, his neighbors hash out plans to buy black-market wine; a pretty nurse exploits a long-standing flirtation with an overbooked neurologist to make sure her patient is seen promptly. In the cramped tenements and crowded hospitals of Puiu's Bucharest, there are no private rooms.

The incessant hubbub of Lazarescu's soundtrack—the booming techno that spills into Lazarescu's flat from an upstairs apartment, the clamor of hospital patients waiting to be seen—violates the (relatively) soothing notion of death as a solitary, singular experience. We want every death to be special, just as every life is, but to the doctors charged with his care (and there are, eventually, quite a few of them), Lazarescu is just another case, and a particularly unsympathetic one at that. It turns out that Lazarescu has picked the wrong night to fall ill: Bucharest's emergency rooms are filled with the victims of a catastrophic road accident, many of them children, and the doctors are in no mood to care for an elderly alcoholic whose troubles are most likely of his own making. Bounced from overloaded hospital to overloaded hospital, Lazarescu is greeted time and again with a condescending lecture on the perils of drink. The warning might seem reasonable once, but repetition quickly makes it maddening, and as the night wears on and Lazarescu becomes more, not less, disoriented, it becomes clear that his problems have nothing to do with alcohol.

Where the original Dante had Virgil to guide him through hell, this one has Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu), a brusque paramedic who becomes the audience's exasperated surrogate. At first, she, too, wants to chalk Lazarescu's problems up to drink; just a shot of vitamins and glucose and she'll be on her way. But as the night drags on, and on, she becomes his champion, pushing (sometimes too hard) against the arrogant recalcitrance of overtaxed doctors. What she doesn't see—and what I missed until I saw the movie a second time—is how many of these doctors eventually yield to the seriousness of Lazarescu's condition. Despite their often appalling bedside manner, they're not unfeeling caricatures, more like worn-out cogs in a machine that never stops grinding them down.

Envisioned as the first of "Six Stories From the Bucharest Suburbs," Lazarescu is an ardent condemnation of the country's medical establishment, but you don't need to be familiar with the state of Romanian health care to follow along. There's a sense of place in every one of the movie's exquisitely tactile hand-held shots (brilliantly captured by Andrei Butica), and of character, as well. We don't need the details of Lazarescu's relationship with his absent daughter spelled out; it's enough to see him in her old room, the walls lined with faded posters of '80s pop bands, her desk covered with yellowing newspapers and wilting plants. Forsaking the omniscience of the documentarian's wide-angle lens, Puiu works with a shallow, ever-shifting depth of field, as if the camera is always struggling to keep pace with events. We're as aware of what we're not seeing as of what we are.

As in the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman (an admitted source of inspiration), Lazarescu's real-time stretches establish an almost physical rapport with the subject; when a doctor presses too hard on Lazarescu's tender abdomen, you may find yourself wincing along with him. There's pain in the connection, but profoundness as well, the sense that even in the darkest, most dehumanizing of environments is a common humanity worth seeking out.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Directed by Cristi Puiu A Tartan Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Five