Ill humor

Ever since the fall of Nicolae Ceauflescu in 1989, Romania has been used as a cheap place to shoot American genre films. As far as Americans can tell, there would seem to be no actual Romanian films. But of course this has more to do with the whims of distributors than anything else. Apparently there is a Romanian national cinema, and maybe “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” isn’t the first movie from that country to be released in the US, but I can’t think of another.

“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” is, in a sense, a comedy, but — as the title suggests — not exactly cheery fluff. Dante Remus Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) is a pensioner in his early 60s, living in a shabby Bucharest apartment with three cats. His daughter has moved to America; his sister, with whom he has a contentious relationship, lives in another city. He is on sociable terms with his neighbors, but he doesn’t seem to have any real friends. Nor does he seem to have any overwhelming interests.

Lazarescu deals with his situation in that most common of ways: He drinks. Which probably has something to do with why he frequently doesn’t feel well.

But tonight he feels particularly sick — he has stomach symptoms and a persistent headache — and he calls the equivalent of 911 for an ambulance. And, when the ambulance seems to be taking forever to arrive, he goes to neighboring couple Sandu (Doru Ana) and Miki (Dana Dogaru) to see if they have any medicine stronger than what he’s been taking.

They don’t, but they find themselves — against Miki’s wishes — looking after him until help arrives. By the time emergency paramedic Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu) gets there, Mr. L is throwing up and walking unsteadily. At first, she thinks all he needs is an injection, but she eventually agrees he should go to the ER.

Unfortunately, there has been a big traffic accident that night, and the nearest hospital is swamped with critical cases. Mioara manages to push her way in, but — when it becomes clear that the patient needs a CT scan and that the hospital’s machine is booked for several more hours — she and driver Leo (Gabriel Spahieu) end up lugging the increasingly ill Lazarescu from one facility to the next.

From the first phone call, literally everyone Lazarescu encounters scolds him for drinking, assuming that this is the source of his sickness and often implying that it makes him less deserving of help. Besides, he’s old, he’s socially useless, and he has no family members who really care about him. He is the quintessential low-priority case, and, if it weren’t for the dutiful Mioara pushing to get him treated, he would probably be expiring back at his apartment.

The irony is that that would probably be preferable to what poor Lazarescu goes through, as he’s hauled all night long all around Bucharest, being treated more and more contemptuously by doctors who have long since been stripped of all compassion.

To some degree, it might be preferable for us as well. If there’s a problem with Cristi Puiu’s much-praised feature, it’s that it runs two hours and 35 minutes. Puiu says he was inspired by watching “ER,” which runs on Romanian television. He couldn’t believe how quickly everyone moved. “In my country,” he says, “doctors and everyone else live in slow motion, as though they were on Valium, and still had 500 years to live.”

The result is the cinematic equivalent of a shaggy-dog story: The inevitable, deliberately anticlimactic punch line is less important than the length to which the buildup is protracted. Puiu presents things in something close to real time: Most of the film is made up of very long takes; all that’s omitted is some driving and walking time. Together with the handheld camerawork, this stylistic decision leads to a certain weariness, particularly during the first third, before Lazarescu, Mioara and Leo get on the road. Just because the length may be necessary doesn’t make it any less irritating.

If I knew the slightest thing about Romanian culture, I’d feel more comfortable claiming that “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” is somehow characteristically Romanian. Instead I’ll just note that the dark-comic tone has a kinship to the work of half-Romanian/half-French Eugène Ionesco, the only Romanian writer I’m familiar with. As Lazarescu descends into babbling delirium, everyone around him begins to act increasingly as though he’s a ghost or simply not there; it’s reminiscent of Ionesco’s play “Amédée” (1954), in which a couple manage to go about their business for years, despite the presence of a bloating corpse in their apartment.

Let me quickly mention a film whose virtues and flaws are almost the opposites of “Mr. Lazarescu’s”: Chen Kaige’s latest, “The Promise,” which I wrote about after its futile one-week Oscar-qualifying run at the end of 2005. In the manner of fellow art-house types Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Sense and Sensibility”) and Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “Red Sorghum”) — whose uncharacteristic forays into the martial-arts genre resulted in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers” — Chen has produced a lush period action film with dazzling images and some virtuoso action.

If only it were as good.

While time has made me more receptive to its strong points, “The Promise” — which Miramax was going to release as “Master of the Crimson Armor” before backing out of its distribution deal — is severely compromised by special-effects scenes that are unintentionally risible.

The film starts off well, with an introductory sequence about a little girl named Qingcheng accepting a Faustian bargain from a goddess (Chen Hong, who also produced): She will have worldly fortune but will lose every man she ever loves. These opening minutes are engaging and magical, and then ….

Suddenly it’s 20 years later, and ruthless Gen. Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada), soon to be dubbed Master of the Crimson Armor, uses 132 inexpensive slaves as bait in a huge battle. But one of those slaves, Kunlun (Jang Dong Gun, Korean star of 2004’s “Taegukgi”), can run really fast … too fast, in fact, for the film’s tone to survive. As he speeds along, the CGI effects invoke the broadest moments of Stephen Chow’s “Kung Fu Hustle” and, by extension, Roadrunner cartoons. Subsequent scenes include even worse CGI, but the fault is also in the basic conception: I’m not sure there is a way to have shot Kunlun’s speed without it looking ridiculous.

The story turns into a love triangle comprising Kunlun, Guangming and the now-adult Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung), all of whom are targets of evil Gen. Wuhuan (Nicholas Tse). The emotions are all exaggerated; it takes great care for this sort of excess to work, and nothing kills it faster than hints of the ridiculous. It’s a shame because some of what follows is so terrific.