THIS MOVIE IS NOT A COMEDY!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!

Well it's funny at some points.. When the doctor sais that "We can't have a good conversation here", while the poor pacient was incoherent.. Or the doctor asking for a croissant after refusing to operate the pacient.. Or the light automatically switching off on the stairs while talking to the neighbour... It's loaded with humourous situations... especially during the first hour...

The medical system in Romania is actually even worse that depicted in the movie.. In the movie the doctor refuses bribe which is very rare..The Romanian doctors actually do accept bribe in reality..

The review quotes on the DVD box called it a black comedy. This is the worst misrepresentation of a movie I've ever seen. Going by the box I was expecting something along the lines of Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. Black humour around the death of an individual. What I got was a frustrating boring ordeal of a movie that I had to switch off after 90 minutes.

I also was waiting for the laughs. I played some of the director's interview on the US DVD and he himself says that it's not a comedy.

Yes of course, Dante going into hell, and Lazarescu is a reference to the resurrection of Laser in case anyone missed that (!) I don't know my Virgil well but I imagine it also has to with traveling, returning to your home i.e. the Aeneid/Oddysey.

It is not a comedy. But it has some very dry and offputting stuff that can be classified as humour yes, which can be conceived as just laughing through tears at the absurdity of life and humanity e.g. as some of the other posters said like Beckett or Bergman. It also reminded me a lot of Fassbinder, also not someone generally associated with humor, but I recall the scene in Fear Eats the Soul where after she marries the black Moroccan guy she wants to go to celebrate at the restaurant where Hitler used to have lunch and neither of them are fazed when they do.

I found it mildly humorous how the neighbour's wife kept insisting he try her moussaka even while the guy was blowing chunks.

Outstanding film overall.

Thank you andre giao, it is definitely a comedy. It's what comedy should really be - totally confrontational about the profound absurdity of human existance. That's what Becket's about, Swift, Chaucer, Chekhov, any decent satire. We're so used now to toothless comedy, or if it is black then it's cruel and cynical. Real comedy stares into the abyss and realises that the only honest reaction is helpless laughter, the laughter of release. We're all so bloody po-faced when it comes to illness and death, which is exactly why this underworld of awful hospital environments is so powerful: humanity so scared of dealing with its own mortality that it hides it away and leaves jaded proffesionals to do the dirty work behind closed doors. I was KNOCKED OUT by this movie. I laughed becuase it was so bloody accurate, so truthful about human beings and how they REALLY behave in the face of death and decay. If you want a prettified, sentimental vision of death and dying, watch another saccharine Hollywood movie where some well made-up star dies beautifully surrounded by beautiful, heroic, compassionate doctors.
The incredible power of this movie is how the wreck that Lazarescu starts out as, somehow ends up exuding a kind of tragic grandeur, even as he becomes more and more incoherant and absurd.

I'm not Romanian, but I've definitely been in hospitals like this - they're ALL like this to some extent. They look and smell like toilets because that's what we insist on them being - places we dump human waste. The people that work in them ARE heroic, but, like the nurse here, their heroism is sometimes deeply buried in great swathes of exhaustion and despair and self-preservation.

I won't go on and on, because I'm aware that the general reaction to this movie is obviously bothering me!
Look up the meaning of the word 'absurd', it's one of the most profound words in the English language.

Rant over.