Prepa­ra­tions to Be Togeth­er for an Unknown Peri­od of Time

We all have expe­ri­enced that unset­tling feel­ing of walk­ing into a room and imme­di­ate­ly for­get­ting what brought us there. We are briefly filled with a pro­found ter­ror as the very fab­ric of our lives seems to unrav­el. The sequence of events and choic­es that have led us, not only to this room but to be who we are, sud­den­ly van­ish and are all but forgotten.

Hun­gar­i­an direc­tor Lili Horvát takes this fright­en­ing sen­sa­tion and expands it into a last­ing state of being in her sec­ond fea­ture, Prepa­ra­tions to Be Togeth­er for an Unknown Peri­od of Time. Natasa Stork plays Már­ta, an accom­plished neu­ro­sur­geon who, now in her for­ties, decides to leave her pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can career behind and fol­low the Hun­gar­i­an doc­tor she met at a con­fer­ence back to Budapest.

They are in love, and she has already giv­en too much of her time to her career. Fresh off the plane and with a spring in her step, she goes to their agreed meet­ing place. When he doesn’t show up, Már­ta vis­its him at the hos­pi­tal where he works. See­ing him walk­ing out of the build­ing, she goes to greet him, but he claims not to recog­nise her, tells her they’ve nev­er met, and walks away.

It is an unde­ni­ably play­ful and sus­pense­ful premise, guar­an­teed to keep view­ers on their toes. But rather than fol­low a con­spir­a­to­r­i­al path into the top­ic of gaslight­ing – so top­i­cal, so exhaust­ing – Horvát opts for a more inter­nal and poet­ic jour­ney, one which ulti­mate­ly tells us a lot more about ​“the way we live now” than a sto­ry about a man mak­ing a woman go insane by mak­ing her believe she is act­ing strange.

Stork’s bright and clear face, a small polite smile per­pet­u­al­ly on her lips, is in a med­ical con­text the image of sci­en­tif­ic pre­ci­sion, a reas­sur­ing­ly imper­turbable vis­age to see when await­ing a poten­tial­ly life-threat­en­ing diag­no­sis, as sev­er­al char­ac­ters do in the film. But when she is alone, in the streets of Budapest or in the dilap­i­dat­ed flat she has rent­ed, Márta’s still­ness comes to sug­gest a per­son com­plete­ly detached from her sur­round­ings and iso­lat­ed in her lone­li­ness. In those moments, her roman­tic obses­sion with this elu­sive man begins to look like the irra­tional fan­ta­sy of a per­son so dis­sat­is­fied and alone that she mis­takes her dreams for reality.

In fol­low­ing a char­ac­ter who might be see­ing things, Horvát brings our atten­tion to the way cin­e­ma itself cre­ates mean­ing through images, and she uses this abil­i­ty to make the real­i­ty of what we are see­ing uncer­tain to the end. The film’s ellip­ti­cal edit­ing com­press­es time in such a way that it is impos­si­ble to know for sure how long the man might have been star­ing at Már­ta, how long he might have been away, or how many times he may have looked at her through the crowd, from across a busy room. Per­haps in her mind, Már­ta her­self is edit­ing a series of mean­ing­less moments into a more mean­ing­ful whole.

In any case, what we do see are very roman­tic sce­nar­ios and Horvát, instead of stay­ing at a cold, ana­lyt­i­cal dis­tance from her ago­nised char­ac­ter, infus­es the film with the emo­tions that the woman feels, even with sen­su­al­i­ty. As Már­ta and the mys­te­ri­ous doc­tor con­tin­ue to inter­act (or do they?), the direc­tor allows her protagonist’s long­ing for this stranger, whether real or imag­ined, to shine through. Far from a humil­i­at­ing and cru­el char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion, this film is a study of the lim­its of per­cep­tion that is ten­der and unset­tling in equal measure.

Prepa­ra­tions to Be Togeth­er for an Unknown Peri­od of Time is released dig­i­tal­ly on 19 March.