The Surprise Ending? It's the Absence of One

No jumping to conclusions: Ion Fiscuteanu in "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." (Tartan Films)

The ending of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," a stunning film by the Romanian director Cristi Puiu, is all there in the title. But when it finally comes, after a long and painful odyssey through the Stygian depths of Bucharest's groaning and overstressed hospital system, it hits hard enough to take your breath away. As endings go, it is brutally ungiving. The final moments of this movie, which took a top prize in Cannes last year, are just one more cold iron link in a sad chain of events. Lights out, it's over. That may be the way death brings end to life, but it's not the way most directors bring closure to their plots.

It reminded one of another European art film, the even more daringly inconclusive "Cache" (now available on DVD), a French-language movie that begins with an ominous Hitchcockian flair and then sprawls and frays its various subplots into so many loose ends that no ending could possibly tie them together again. "Cache" builds mystery and tension, raises ever more questions, and leads the viewer to a point of such uncertainty that, almost two hours in, you feel certain it will take two more hours to get out. But then it ends. The camera fixes for a very long shot on a set of stairs, the credits roll and the audience almost invariably gasps. You come away infuriated, or amazed at the audacity of the director, Michael Haneke, who promises so much, then seems to give so little -- forcing viewers to do all the proper work of conclusion for themselves.

The ending of a film, or any narrative, bears a disproportionate amount of the artistic weight. Endings are the last thing we see, and the thing most likely to stay in the memory. And there's a natural inclination, in any long and complex work, to focus on the ending: Art, like life, often passes by in a state of semi-confusion, but a solid ending proves to the audience that the director had control all along. And the power of a good ending has particular resonance in a "closure" society, a society that strives for finality in things of the heart (closure after grief) and clairvoyance in most everything else (how's this going to turn out?).

But Hollywood has fetishized endings to the extent that they've taken on an exaggerated and distorting importance in the evaluation of film. All threads must be tied up, as in the ostentatious multiple endings in the last installment of "The Lord of the Rings." Films that win critical plaudits often do so by virtue of clever endings that subvert every premise or assumption upon which the audience has built its understanding of the movie. The hero is in fact the villain. The whole thing was in fact a dream. The type of subterfuge that filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "The Village") traffics in. It is a symptom of a nervous and suspicious age that we consider a deft disillusionment the height of cinematic complexity. And the effect on criticism -- most reviewers and even many serious critics feel constrained never to give away an ending -- is pernicious. If the ending makes the film, how can the critic discuss the work without discussing the conclusion?

Hollywood endings are not necessarily satisfying, or happy. Yet no matter whether they subvert or disappoint, they are almost always endings, clearly demarcated and conclusive. If a thread is left obviously loose -- the monster skulks away into the dark -- it is almost assuredly the promise of a sequel, and no real disappointment to the viewer. It's an ending with benefits: the promise of more.

The "Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "Cache" are markedly different. They refuse any of the emotional satisfaction of a proper ending. Rather than close off the film, the inconclusiveness forces the audience back into it, to search for an explanation, or resolution on some other level than narrative. These films do to the viewer what parents must ultimately do to children: force them to shift for themselves. If you're in a certain needy frame of mind, this is the very definition of the art-house film nightmare: to invest hours in a story and have it end like a surly shopkeeper pulling down the storefront grate. But it's also a sign of trust, on the director's part, to let his children go forth to make sense of things on their own.

It feels like betrayal, to be shut out of the comforts of a traditional, Aristotelian narrative, with its precise storytelling arc. "Now a whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end," wrote the old philosopher, about the shaping of tragedy in "The Poetics." It may seem like a truism -- of course a story must have a beginning and a middle and an end -- but it has cast a long shadow over the making of narrative (and other arts) in the West. Resisting it's strictures, and playing with endings, has become almost a genera in itself.

In music, Haydn explored what would eventually become the great cop-out of non-endings -- the fade-out -- in his "Farewell" Symphony, in which the orchestra players leave the stage one by one, until only two violins remain. In a time when a musical language that emphasized a strong vector to a sharp conclusion was universal, a musical language that prized climactic endings, Haydn's symphony is radically anticlimactic. Sibelius, the great Finnish symphonist, tried something even more subversive in his Fifth Symphony, which leaves the impression of ending randomly -- just before the music runs out of gas, the symphony screeches to a halt, with an exaggerated sense of finale that paradoxically feels inconclusive. It's as if the composer said, you want an ending? There. And slammed it into the score mid-thought.

Two things, in the 19th and early 20th century, help fuel the rebellion against the satisfaction of clear endings. At the same time that the journalistic industry was fueling the tied-up-neat-as-a-bow form of the short story, the genre that would produce the cliche of the poignant ending found in tales by O. Henry, it was also paying the great serial novelists (Dickens among them) to write almost endlessly. Chapter after chapter, their tales spun on, structured more as an infinite chain of small cliff-hangers than anything like Aristotle's neat sense of beginning and ending. Journalism presented the world as an endless influx of the new, so why shouldn't narrative reflect a similar amorphousness? Of course these novels did have endings, but the form emphasized their bulk, their middle, their ongoingness more than their finality. And it wasn't just limited to serial novels. At the end of the 19th century, Arthur Schnitzler wrote "Hands Around," a dizzying circle of a play that follows a series of 10 sexual encounters that begin and end with the same prostitute.

And then came World War I, which for many artists would shatter all the old forms, and endings with them. Arnold Schoenberg's prewar tamperings with tonality would yield fruit after the war in music that had no particular internal necessity of driving to conclusion. Between, say, George Bernard Shaw's comedy "Arms and the Man," and Erich Maria Remarque's unrelentingly bleak "All Quiet on the Western Front" (to take two very different texts that both deal with an increasingly pragmatic and cynical view of war) is a small revolution in the taste for bitter endings in art. Shaw takes on a serious subject and wraps it all up neatly with the dazzling virtuosity of a comic playwright. But he was writing in the great age of peace that preceded the war; no one would write like this after the guns of August.

And yet, despite all the artistic precedents, the centuries of small rebellions against making endings that do too much work, that distort the darker reality of the life that art supposedly imitates, much of the film business is inexorably committed to an aesthetic of suspense and conclusive endings. Go to the opera, or the ballet, and the plot (with the ending) is printed in the program. The idea that art is about suspense, ultimately relieved in the catharsis of an interesting ending, is remarkably anachronistic in relation to the other arts. Yet it prevails in the cinema, and for $8.50 audiences demand it.

Which makes works like "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" remarkably refreshing. The movie follows the slow and excruciating demise of an elderly man, an alcoholic, who is shipped from hospital to hospital, encountering a grim cast of doctors and nurses indifferent to his case. The hours tick by and the brain injury that will eventually kill him (full disclosure: The film doesn't definitively show him dying) grows more and more debilitating. When the end comes, there's no comment, no indictment of the people who neglected even the most basic norms of decent care, and no epitaph. The man has been fully transformed into an object, a transformation that would be diminished in its impact if the film attempted any moral observation. In one sense, this is the most natural place to end a story -- when the title character's death.

But the excruciating objectivity of simply turning off the camera at the end of his life ultimately exposes all the conceits of standard narratives about death. In the end, the usual tales about death fall back on affirmation of some sort. Life goes on. The dead didn't die in vain. The shades linger to watch the survivors carry on. Not so Mr. Lazarescu. Despite his name, with its reference to the revivified Lazarus, when death comes, he's nothing more than a couple hundred pounds of flabby garbage on a slab.

That takes courage, for a film director. Haneke's ending to "Cache" is no less impressive, suggesting that the convoluted history of guilt and recrimination that has infected France's relationship with Algeria can't be disentangled. As the film widens out from its first subject, the terrorization of a bourgeois couple by an unknown video stalker, it becomes a wider allegory of the endless cycles of suspicion, hurt and retribution between France and its former territory. By necessity, the film's structure parallels the frustrating and open-ended reality of a long war that has gone underground, into the suburbs and psyche of France. There's a hard, cold moral integrity to the film's sudden and fruitless ending.

The courage displayed by both directors isn't just about storytelling. Ultimately, leaving a work of art open-ended is a challenge to art itself. Only with art could human beings enjoy the limited but transcendent power of knowing how a chain of events would come out. Only by telling stories could they control destinies, even if those destinies were limited to imitations of men in a story or a poem. Still, it was a thrilling kind of power, and you can still sense its ancient allure every time you open a novel and, carefully, with a sense of deep superstition, avoid looking at the last page. But with that power came the temptation to treat stories with a tyrannical control, to over-manipulate the made-up world so that it had more interest, or gave greater pleasure, or told a more starkly moralistic tale.

The thrill of these two movies is the extent to which the directors have relinquished that power.

By not ending their stories, they put art back on the level of life, and it is on that level that it has the most to say to us.