Ventnor Winter Gardens
Romania 2005 150 mins Cert 15
Dir: Cristi Puiu
Cast: Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminita Gheorghiu, Gabriel Spahiu, Doru Ana
Puiu’s magnificent tragi-comedy, set in contemporary Bucharest, charts the final hours of the dying pensioner Lazarescu. It is about the endgame of old age – a blacker-than-black, deader-than-deadpan comedy with something of Samuel Beckett about it. Poor Mr Lazarescu’s illnesses, aches and pains are snowballing into a critical mass of mortality, and over the movie’s running time we realise that, at some stage, he has crossed the invisible line that awaits all of us: the line between being unwell and being a dead man walking
