MovieChat Forums > Moartea domnului Lazarescu (2005) Discussion > Pretentious?

Pretentious?

posted 10 years ago by Theodor_Birch
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I couldn't help feel this movie was a bit pretentious...
It does everything that the cliché of a pretentious art house movie does: It's slow. It deals only with illness and death and with old men who only a small segment of people can relate too. It insists on dwelling on the ennui of old age and never ones tries to be captivating or interesting.

I love "foreign films", I hate Hollywood and action-blockbusters.
But this movies takes the easy way out, just like Hollywood-movies take the easy way out.
There are some truly great Arthouse movies that manage to be profound and riveting at the same time. Taxidermia; Aura; Doogtooth; The Devil, Probably; A Short Film About Killing.
This movie however, just plain, refuses to play fair and is so far up its own pretentious BS it seems to think that a slow moving plot, repetition and dead ends make great art. It doesn't.

This is very much like that The Simpsons parody "Worker and Parasite" - a nightmarish and non-linear mess of random scenes.
And all the while claiming to be a comedy.

Yeah, *beep* hilarious...

[–] andreifuf 10 years ago

Lol, Worker and Parasite, I've forgotten about that one! That was genius.

Yes, I see where you're coming from.

a nightmarish and non-linear mess of random scenes.

really, lol

Yes, funnily enough, Mr L is a bit similar to Worker and Parasite, it shows the nightmarish side of Eastern Europe life. It's more like a documentary. I felt the same way about "Little Vera" describing the human misery in the communist states, filled with ugliness, bad housing, insane interlopes and dirty landscapes. I found it gross and abhorrent. Stupid and rather useless, too.

Maybe you felt the same way about Mr L. But 'Mr L' is not a mere documentary about misery, but it serves a purpose. 'Mr L' was directed at:

1. changing the mentality of hospital personnel in Romania and
2. highlighting the bureaucracy of healthcare.

Doctors and nurses tend to become complacent and indifferent, for different reasons. And maybe this movie is trying to change that a little. Satire is a slap in the face of someone, in this case, hospital employees and healthcare bureaucracy. This movie is a way of berating them into changing their attitude. Which unfortunately, they haven't. They probably said 'Nice try!' and kept on ignoring patients and filling tons of forms while smoking and receiving bribes.

If anything, this movie is too soft on them:
A. it doesn't show medical personnel receiving bribes, which they do on a massive scale. The writers probably didn't want to lay it too thick.
B. the movie is supposed to happen the same night a big accident took place, so the hospitals are supposedly full. That is a way to sweeten reality, because hospital personnel are ALWAYS like this and worse. The writers shouldn't have taken it easy on them, by creating the 'car crash' pretext. It should have been a day like any other day, with all the problems shown in the movie, and more.

The end justifies the means here.