PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME: A Game of ‘He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not’

The concept of ‘love at first sight’ is strange and dubious, yet it always makes for a compelling and sumptuous cinematic premise. Hungary’s submission this year for the 2021 Academy Awards Best International Film Category, Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, is a movie with a great title and a great premise based on this romantic phenomenon, which interestingly, we don’t actually get to see take place in the film itself. We never really know what happened when the film’s central character Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork) first met János Drexler (Viktor Bódo) other than through Márta’s explanation that they just locked eyes at a medical conference in New Jersey and planned to meet again at the Pest side of the Liberty Bridge in Budapest, Hungary. The movie starts at the bridge with Márta waiting. When János doesn’t show up and she tracks him down, he says he’s never met her before. It’s his word against hers and this little romantic mystery kicks off with eager anticipation.

A Women Under the Influence of Love

While Márta’s obsession with Janos is based on a fantastical phenomenon, director Lili Horvát tries to play the events as realistic as possible. The movie hints at but never really dives into the surrealism or noir that is generally the choice of tone that a first-time filmmaker would choose for this kind of thing. Horvát’s influence seems to be more in line with the traditional Euro-art scene of Michel Haneke or Christian Petzold, where mysteries unfold in methodical stages of mundane moments in life. Márta takes a job at a hospital that is clearly underneath her credentials only for the fact that Janos works there too and she can see him from time to time. She follows him to the signing of his new medical book, at a stage play, and even in the surgery room where they work together to heal a man’s injured stomach.

Natasa Stork gives an earnest performance and her ruminative looks at Janos, amplified by the film’s editing, gives an uneasy feeling of her somewhere between a stalker and just a lonely soul. There is a little bit of Fatal Attraction Glenn Close in Márta in the way she lives – alone in a nearly empty apartment with a mattress on the floor – but also some of Liv Ullman in Scenes from a Marriage in the awkward and confused reconciling of unrequited love. She has therapy sessions that intercut the narrative, mostly concentrating on her face, giving morsels of information as to how exactly she became infatuated with Janos. These sequences also plant the seed of doubt between simple miscommunication of friendly cues – something familiar and frustrating to many who have ever tried to gauge if ‘interest’ was being returned or not.

A Hallway With No Destination

The ambiguity of this miscommunication is the key mystery that keeps the viewer guessing. Are we following someone who is delusional? Is she being duped by a man who coldly wants her to go away? When she does talk to Janos, or they seem friendly together, are they really talking? Does he even actually exist? One sequence, like something out of a twee Wes Anderson romance, where Márta and János are seemingly on opposite ends of the street and as they walk their footsteps and pace mimic each other perfectly and they smile in each other’s direction the entire time, is the closest the film gets to surrealism. The movement simply begins and ends with no indication of whether it really happened. Even afterward where it seems Márta and János begin seeing each other more often, the strangeness of the mimicking scene is a lingering shadow of colossal doubt in our minds whether we exist in Marta’s warped mind or we really are seeing love blossom.

There is a sense of anticipation for an answer that piles on throughout the movie guided by Horvát’s use of point-of-view shots. She swerves her camera around as the eyes of Márta on the bridge waiting for János to show up. In an eerie moment, the closest the film gets to being noir, we are taken down a dimly lit burgundy colored curved hallway in a POV single-take shot, wondering at every moment whether something or anything is going to reveal itself on the other side of the curve. Preparations for Being Together for an Unknown Period of Time, like its title suggests, is a peculiar tale that lives on its frustrating evocation of the ambiguity of love.

Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time was released on streaming at select virtual theaters across the U.S. on January 22, 2021

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