New York Dispatch. 3.

If you have the rare chance to talk to someone in the US (or at the New York Film Festival) about The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, you'll probably hear that Americans won't get it. I'm not so sure. The director has been quoted saying that his film has a "Rumanian slowness." I suppose that everybody has the right to be nationalistic about something, but that slowness could just as easily be associated with Fred Wiseman.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is not a documentary, but it could have been one. A handheld camera watches an aging, affable engineer living alone on a pension that barely buys food for the pack of cats in his apartment. Dante Lazarescu stumbles from his bottle to his pills, vomiting. And this is just the beginning of this voyage into the middle of the night. He calls an ambulance and he waits. It's Saturday night.

A few more fits of vomiting and looks of despair from Dante Lazarescu's neighbors, and you get a sense of where Cristi Puiu's film is going when the ambulance arrives and the attendant smells alcohol on his breath. Isn't the whole thing his own fault?

Eventually, as the camera hovers over the man, the kindhearted attendant, Mioara, sees that he's a sick man. As he limps off, held up by her, he pleads with his neighbor to feed his cats. You know that won't happen. Over the course of the night, Mioara will labor to convince any of the doctors examining him that Lazarescu needs something more than a lecture, a good night's sleep and some time away from the booze. She and the ambulance shuttle him from hospital to hospital - at each of them, the doctors try to send him somewhere else. Sound familiar? It reminded me of a trip to King's County Hospital in Brooklyn on a Sunday night twenty years ago. Bucharest has fewer guns.

Obviously, this isn't America. It's one of Cristi Puiu's planned Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs, this one seen for the most part from a stretcher. It has a tactile handheld realism to it, but it's also a parable. Here is a man (a mute everyman) in his greatest need, expressing that need as his consciousness slips into delirium. On his journey, he's treated with neglect, indifference, humor (from a wickedly nasty neurosurgeon impatient for coffee) and even with compassion from the ambulance attendant who never deserts him. As you might have guessed, she falls short of becoming the Beatrice who'll take Dante to paradise.

Over more than two hours, we see that suffering is far from ennobling for the people who witness it or treat it. The camera watches it all, with an inertia that we know from Fred Wiseman. Or is its blank stare the ghoulishness that affixes your eyes to a bloody car accident? Take your pick. You can also pick your literary allusions - Celine, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (with the characters' deeply ordinary observations on it all), Charon Crossing the Styx, Tolstoy.

Puiu is no delicate aesthete. You almost need rubber gloves to watch this film. The press corps came out of the screening that I saw with jaws dropped. I must admit that I was expecting a more troubling experience, one with less dignity and far less humor. I was also expecting a far grimmer picture of hospitals in Rumania. Having spent lots of time in Eastern Europe, I was struck by how clean these environments were on screen. Somehow, I wonder. In any case, I now can't wait for more stories from Puiu. There's something of Balzac here, in the vividness and the emotion.

Mr. Lazarescu will be a tough sell. God, that's an understatement, even though the marketing department seems to have signed off on the series title, Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs. Is that why the director didn't come to New York? I'm rooting for the Oscar for Best Actor nomination that I hope against hope will go to Ion Fiscuteanu, who just lies on a stretcher and fades for the last 90 minutes. Now that is a performance. Assuming that there's justice in the world - an assumption that this film does its best to undermine - Best Actress, of course, should go to Luminita Gheorghiu, the humane ambulance attendant. You heard it here.

Another Eastern European triumph at the NYFF (and lots of other festivals) is Jestem (I Am), the luminous film by Dorota Kedzierzawska. It's an old story, an orphan's tale, and this tough-faced orphaned boy is so abandoned that we never learn his name, only a disparaging nickname, Mongrel. We watch as he's scorned by his peers at school, and spurned by his drunken mother who doesn't seem to turn away any of the men who want to sleep with her. When she falls into a stupor - she seems to have conceived her son in the same state of mind - he bites her. She deserves it. Perhaps he deserves the name, too.

Mongrel is also admired enviously by the lonely young sisters who watch him from the shelter of their shoreline house near an old barge where the boy seeks shelter.

Much of Jestem is silent. The camera tells the story here, reminding us why Polish cinematographers are so respected. The camera gives the film its drama and its dreaminess. The young boy moves through the stoney town where he is despised for the sins of his mother, through woods of every autumnal color and toward a river with a gauzy haze that reminds you of Whistler. In the barge - lit by candles because he has nothing else to make light - there's an elegant warmth to the image, even though his cave is mired in scavenged food. It's anything but romantic.

During Jestem, I found myself thinking of Tideland, Terry Gilliam's new extravaganza, seen like this one through the eyes of a child. Gilliam poured on the bodily fluids, threw in a Jack-in-the-Box monster or two and tried hard to shock with corpses that just lay there making all the noises of decomposition in (what else?) a haunted house. It's sort of like a haunted house ride in an amusement park, based on the tawdriest assumptions about children.

I've read reviews that take issue with the way the perspective of a child is shown in Jestem. The assumption seems to be that children see the world in a particular way. I've never found that to be true (and I don't know two children who are exactly alike), but I certainly found a lot of truth in this story of vulnerability and survival. See the director's previous film, Crows. You'll know what I mean.

Perhaps the critics of Jestem's visual virtuosity faulted the sequences of the film that crept toward magic realism. If that's the case, then maybe Bubble is the film for them.

All of 74 minutes, it's a triangle with an odd twist and an experiment in style with a tremendous precision. Both of those efforts work in Steven Soderbergh's new movie that was made with no stars and no money. Let's hope he sets an example here.

His story of shy, poor, inarticulate and mostly unattractive co-workers in a toy factory plays on petty jealousy and its monstrous effects. All it takes is the arrival of a pretty girl whose job is to paint smiles on the rubber dolls that are popped out of molds by the dozen. Her murder shakes things up.

From the first frame, I was struck by the look of the film. The images and the setting (an Appalachian town that kids grow up yearning to leave) seem drawn from the color photographs of William Eggleston. Eggleston's work is very much in the air in film circles now. He may be the one living photographer that filmmakers can actually name. Michael Almereyda's documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World, which played at the Toronto Film Festival, is now in theaters in the US. It's an admiring walk through Eggleston's practice of photography and its evolving reception among critics and museums. Eggleston's own film, Stranded in Shanghai, edited down from black and white footage that he shot in 1974, was also shown in Toronto.

Eggleston called his pictures "the war against the obvious." In Bubble, the Eggleston-ian palette is the obvious context for a drama that's anything but that. Watching the camera linger on detail after detail, I was struck by how the image can dictate the pace of a film, elongating time in the process. Watching as characters struggled to say anything, I thought of Aki Kaurismäki's films, such as Match Factory Girl and The Man Without a Past. I felt as if I was watching a Kaurismäki film in all its economy when the laconic Kyle stood mutely and removed dolls' heads, each with a distinctive pop, from a frame of molds.

Ultimately, Kaurismäki's characters are so iconized in their simplicity that verisimilitude ceases to matter, although he makes sure you don't lose your emotional attachment to them. Soderbergh also observes mute automatic behavior in factories and interrogation rooms. If Kaurismäki lyricises the ordinary without turning it into an aesthetic escape, Soderbergh freezes the setting into an Eggleston moment that seems to shape or constrain the action inside of it. The frame is refined; the story is still full of grit.

In Kaurismäki's films, the style almost predestines his characters to the conclusion of their story. It's no surprise. You never thought such glacial movement could reach an end in 70 minutes or so. In Bubble, Soderbergh is playing tricks. Like Hitchcock, he throws you a McGuffin, a real softball, and then he twists you past your expectations.

For the last few years, I've admired Soderbergh as a craftsman, and I've thought that he represents some of the best qualities that the industry that makes his big films can offer - competence, efficiency, precision, versatility. Bubble confirms all that, but it also shows that he doesn't need a fortune to do it well. As I said before, I hope other filmmakers are watching.

Posted by dwhudson at September 26, 2005 12:52 PM