Puiu's masterwork is an epic

Having inveighed against long movies, I now have to admit that some of them actually sustain their length. This extraordinary Romanian odyssey is one of them. It is the inaugural picture in a projected series called Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs; if the rest are as good, Cristi Puiu's series may well vie with Kieslowski's Decalogue in quality and relevance.

Dante Remus Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) is an ailing 63-year-old, smelling of alcohol, neglect and the cats he looks after. He complains of a severe four-day headache, calls in the neighbours to help, and is carted off in an ambulance. The rest of the film is spent following him on a journey round the Romanian capital's hospitals.

No one wants to treat him, partly because there's just been an accident alert and partly because he is old, awkward, possibly a drunk and somehow dispensable. A combination of arrogant doctors, medical bureaucracy and uncaring nurses results in him being pushed from pillar to post; he is unable or unwilling to sign consent forms or contact the relatives who might look after him.

This may be Bucharest, but it could equally be anywhere, which is one of the film's triumphs. It spreads its acerbic wings far further than Puiu's home country and prompts us constantly to think what might happen to such a man here.

Another triumph is the way it is made. Puiu has taken his cue from the great documentarist Frederick Wiseman by shooting his fiction with hand-held cameras.

He holds scenes for well over the average length, as if allowing us to peep into the incompetent and uncaring world the old man faces in real time. It only occasionally doesn't work; the whole grows in stature by the minute.

Puiu doesn't play for sympathy. The old man is no paragon, and not all the hospital staff are uncaring fools and villains. Nothing is over-emphasised, nothing simplified. This is tragic-comedy as much as an increasingly hellish drama, full of spiteful wit to make you laugh out loud, often at the same time as you feel the shock of the old man's circumstances.

It is wonderful to see a work of such weight and feeling emanating from a small corner of Europe hitherto unregarded for its films. Make no mistake, The Death of Mr Lazarescu is one of the very best movies of recent years, able to stand alongside Haneke's Hidden as a commentary on our careless, emotionally frozen times.

Puiu now stands tall as one of the most intriguing film-makers in Europe. Don't miss what looks to me like a masterwork.

The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu
Cert: 15