Watching Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr.
Lazarescu,
some might be tempted to think its astonishing naturalistic longueurs could be
duplicated by anyone with a camera and a few free hours. But making the
minutiae of life hold continuous interest is no easy task, as demonstrated by
Puiu's fledgling first feature, 2001's Stuff And Dough. The basic framework is
the same: He starts the clock ticking on a urgent task, then fills the minutes
with the kind of aimless chatter that devours most of our waking hours, so each
pointless argument seems like a maddening denial of an imminent crisis.
Although the movies use similar strategies, it
turns out to make a big difference whether the pressing issue is the slow death
of an elderly hermit, or a drug delivery run by a shiftless dropout. In Stuff
And Dough,
Alexandru Papadopol is given four hours and a suspiciously large amount of
money to drive a bag of "medical substances" to Bucharest, but he's so
thick-witted that he doesn't consider he might be doing something illegal until
an angry thug smashes his car window. His attitude far outpacing his aptitude,
Papadopol nods impatiently as California Dreamin's Razvan Vasilescu
stresses the need for speed. Then he climbs back into bed the second he's
alone. His friends Dragos Bucur and Ioana Flora prove no quicker on the draw,
although their lovers' quarrels enliven many a dead patch of road.
Stuff And Dough sometimes briefly turns
into a slow-speed chase movie—think Bullitt filmed with stick-shift
vans on Romanian back roads. But for the most part, the movie is as adrift as
its post-teen characters, slogging through the muck of post-Communist Europe
with eyes cast firmly downward. (It was shot on battered 16mm of varying
quality, which only enhances the sense of despair.) There's no question of the
mood Puiu means to capture, the sullen anomie of a rootless generation, but too
often, he's just spinning his wheels.