Toamna trecuta, in Romania aparusera, pe DVD, filmele lui Nicolae Margineanu. Pretul unui DVD trecea binisor de $20 si nici macar nu era All Regions pentru a fi redate pe un DVD-player normal in SUA. Iata ca acum filmele lui Nicolae Marginean pot fi cumparate in SUA la jumate din pretul la care aparusera in Romania. Linkul este: Nicolae Margineanu in SUA (NTSC)
Pana la urma, functioneaza el si capitalismul, numai ca unii sunt defazati...
Pana la urma, functioneaza el si capitalismul, numai ca unii sunt defazati...
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Margineanu ca Margineanu, adica mai ine mai tarziu decat niciodata; cand o sa-i vedem filmul lui Puiu insa?
April 23, 2006
'Death of Mr. Lazarescu' Comes After a Bout of Hypochondria
By ALAN RIDING
PARIS — For a movie director who spent two years suffering from severe hypochondria, it might seem reassuring to shoot in a hospital. Unless, of course, the story's central character expires. And that much is already announced in the title of Cristi Puiu's award-winning film, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."
Fortunately, this is more of a "What if?" movie. "I wanted to give a certain shape to this fear of dying alone, of no one else around paying attention to me," said Mr. Puiu, 38, showing no signs of ill health during a recent visit to Paris from his native Romania. "I experienced this and I wanted to tell it."
In "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," which opens on Wednesday for two weeks at the Film Forum in New York, Mr. Puiu's stand-in is Dante Remus Lazarescu, a retired engineer and widower who lives in a grim Bucharest apartment with his three cats. His daughter has emigrated to Canada and his out-of-town sister takes much of his pension. His only consolation is the bottle.
This, at least, is not autobiographical, although alcoholism is a serious problem in Romania. But Mr. Puiu had to invent little to come up with the rest of the story. "There was a case around 2000 when an ambulance drove a patient around to lots of hospitals which refused him," he said. "Eventually, the nurse accompanying him left him on a street to die."
In the movie, Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) appears to have a stroke. After his neighbors and a nurse blame his drinking, they eventually call an ambulance. Three hospitals find reasons not to admit in. In the fourth, after being prepared for surgery and left to wait, he dies, alone.
The film casts a skeptical eye on hospital life: its crises and tedium, as well as its self-important doctors, flirtatious nurses and enduring patients. There is plenty of humor in the film, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year. But the humor can be dark.
By "undressing" doctors, Mr. Puiu seems intent on avenging himself against the medical profession. "When I said I was ill, they said, 'Please go home,' " he recalled in fluent English. "When I really was ill, having blood pumped from my stomach, a doctor came to me chewing gum. 'Is this serious?' I asked. 'Yes, you're going to die,' he said — and left. He could not have been serious, but there was no sign of irony."
Giving Lazarescu's experience a certain universality, the hospitals where Mr. Puiu spent 39 nights for filming look clean, modern and fairly well equipped. With public health budgets being squeezed throughout Europe, stories of government hospitals turning away emergency cases are also becoming increasingly common in more developed countries.
Where the movie assumes a more Romanian identity, perhaps, is in the public's — the patients' — passivity in the face of authority, even 16 years after the ouster of the country's home-grown tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu. Anyone with authority, including doctors, has the last word. "As a country, we have not come to terms with our past," Mr. Puiu said. In his own case, psychotherapists attributed his hypochondria to his inability to manage either failure or success. And of these, he has known both.
One memory still haunts him: his failure to pass an entry examination for a special art-focused high school when he was 14. At the time, he was devoted to painting, but instead he was channeled into a science and engineering education. It was years before he returned to painting.
After high school, he was drafted for military service. Because he had an aunt in Britain, he was placed in a unit of young men of questionable loyalty to the regime. And since the unit was not trusted with guns, Mr. Puiu watched the December 1989 Romanian uprising on television.
There was a touch of Balkan surrealism to what followed. "I was told that if I gave four packets of cigarettes to a lieutenant, he would give me a certificate proclaiming me a hero of the revolution," he said, "and I could get an apartment. So I called my brother and he brought me the cigarettes and I was given a certificate saying I fought courageously."
"But when I left the army," he went on, "I learned some friends had been shot and one was killed, so I didn't go any further with the certificate. The whole country was living a lie. Everything was a big lie. I have the certificate as proof of the lie. I was not a revolutionary. I was not interested in politics."
Still, the end of the dictatorship enabled Mr. Puiu to move to Switzerland, where he studied first jewelry making, then painting and finally cinema. In 1996, after four years away, he returned to Bucharest and found work in television and advertising. His first feature film, "Stuff and Dough," was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at the 2001 Cannes festival.
But this recognition plunged him into a depression that took the form of hypochondria, Mr. Puiu said. "The problem is that I am not used to success," he insisted. Nor, it seems, is Romania. Even after his short, "Cigarettes and Coffee," won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004, his request for financing for a new feature film was initially turned down. "I wrote to the minister of culture," he said, "and the money came through."
"The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" has since been released around Europe and was Romania's candidate for this year's Academy Award for best foreign-language film. It was also the most popular Romanian film shown in Romania last year, although it was seen by just 30,000 people. "In 1989, we had 420 screens in the country," Mr. Puiu said. "Now there are only 140."
Still, he is pressing on with a project that he calls "Six Stories From the Bucharest Suburbs," with each story, or movie, tackling a different aspect of love. But do not expect romance: "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," after all, was the first in the series — devoted to love of humanity.
"I'd next like to make a film about love in a couple," he said, "or rather, the lack of love. It has to be like that. It's not giving answers. It's raising questions."
Ce post m'a beaucoup aide dans mon positionnement. Merci pour ces informations
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