Jamie passion and passionfruit!

Another dark dark movie that has you thinking long and hard about the mess we have got ourselves into in this planet and the priorities we have.  To summarise the plot in a few lines, 62 year old Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) is a none-too-exemplary patient who decides his stomach pains are too much to bear and wants medical treatment one Saturday night in Bucharest.  He rings the paramedics, they  take their time – finally it is decided he should go to hospital and an odyssey of hours visiting four different hospitals to try to get an accurate diagnosis, the right tests and finally be admitted ensues.  We watch in a sort of real time effect as the nurse accompanying him (Luminita Gheorghiu) goes into bat on his behalf and faces the wall of overworked but also very patronising and unsympathetic health professionals, the overcrowded hospitals and the fact that bureaucracy and the handling of it takes pride of place over basic health care. The simple obstacles seen in this movie are examples of what can happen anywhere.  Cristi Puiu takes a universal topic and a simple story and makes it into a real and frightening moral tale.  The direction of a big cast of actors and what he chooses to show in each scene is excellent and although this is a slow moving movie, it keeps you gripped with a sort of morbid fascination.  It gives you a lot to think about.

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