Romania’s worthy sole selection among eclectic features and shorts at the 2005 New York Film Festival and its related events, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu/Moartea domnului Lazarescu evokes myths of the Underworld--Remus, Dante and guide Virgil (two characters have the latter name) and, of course, Lazarus -- but takes place in the realm of the living. First of a projected Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs dealing with “love” and inspired by admiration for Rohmer’s half-dozen contes moraux of the 1960s, director/cowriter Christi Puiu's mordantly dry-humored film tackles “love of humanity,” or, rather, the prevalent lack thereof.

Suspense absent starting from the title, it relies on character sketches as each responds to the inarticulate Lazarescu’s (Ion Fiscuteanu) long night’s dying. Confined to interiors in a smelly apartment and stairwell, an ambulette, and emergency and CAT scanner rooms, it reinforces these character-observers’ views with a shoulder-height camera-eye, sans pans, panoramas or zooms.

In a prologue which, given the four minutes over two-and-a-half hours run time, some viewers felt should have been edited further, Dante Remus Lazarescu grows weaker from chronic complaints. His B4 Fetesti Street flat cluttered with nibbled food, hair from three cats, vomit-stained coverings and a TV set reporting on a spectacular Saftica Bridge bus accident, Lazarescu dials older sister Eva, who has spoken with his daughter Bianca in Canada, asks about his repayment to her second husband, Virgil, and tells him to stop drinking. Amidst humorous small-talk squabbles, sympathetic yet separated neighbors, too, caution about the boozing, recommend this or that medication, and notify 911 when he collapses into his bathtub.

Thus begins a real-surreal odyssey through medical metropolis-as-inferno. Several audience thank-goodness-I-don’t-live-there-in-Bucharest comments to the contrary, unhappy personal experience and those of others suggest that it could be most anywhere, even AMA-salaried America. In what appears real time -- wall clocks and comments actually read six elapsed hours -- the acted-upon, increasingly non-participant patient is trundled from one jammed ER -- that fateful bus accident -- to another.

Painter as well as filmmaker, on this journey to man’s end, Puiu links a tragicomic series of vignettes in actual hospitals, fluorescent-lit pale blue or uneasy yellow walls, technicians, aides, nurses and doctors, a surprising number of the latter of whom are young women. Overworked, surely underpaid, generous or selfish, harried, compassionate or indifferent, ironic, jealous, sometimes burned-out, gum- or apple-chewing, faithful or philandering, related by occasional mutual acquaintances, they are differentiated in the few minutes allotted to each.

Widowed retired engineer Lazarescu has made his choices, and his bed, but the readiness-is-all path is sooner or later universal for all that. He kvetches, but the camera does not reveal what he observes on sliding into dissolution. He, or another, is present as two people talk, maybe disagree on a diagnosis or course to follow, and these others rather than he are deftly brought to life, as for instance divorced balding father and emergency driver Leo/Leonard (Gabriel Spahieu). Most of all, there is Mioara Avram (Luminita Gheorghiu), ambulance nurse (“Asistent”), fifty-five-year-old mother of two grown children whose generation she cannot understand, cigarette-smoker, guide, and the best of engagé love and humanity.

Does the abrupt-cut end start at the title, or with the hourglass turned a month shy of sixty-three years ago on the nineteenth of the following month, November? Or before? In a scene Rembrandt would approve, head shaven and bellyfat slipped sideways, the patient is laid out alone. Perhaps he is gone, perhaps he smiles.

Distressing instead of depressing, the lonely disappearance of this, or any, individual, has largely encountered a vacuum of indifference. But not quite, for there is also anger, outrage, concern and, best and last, caring love.

(Released by Tartan Films; not rated by MPAA.)