Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time Review – A Clever, Uncanny Love Story

 

Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time Review – A Clever, Uncanny Love Story in hindi

The Hungarian entry for best international feature film may not have made it into the 93rd Oscars selection, but I’d strongly suggest that you place it on your own viewing shortlist. From its teasingly enigmatic title (translated fairly literally from the Hungarian original) to its neatly cyclical narrative, this crystalline tale of memory, love and brain surgery from writer-director Lili Horvát (who made 2015’s The Wednesday Child) is a treat – sinewy, seductive and beautifully strange.

good morning in tamil is quietly charismatic as Márta Vizy, a Hungarian neurosurgeon who has carved out a respectable career in the US. Yet following a brief encounter with fellow brain specialist and author János Drexler (Viktor Bodó) at a medical conference in New Jersey, her life has been upturned by the realisation that he is “what I’ve been looking for”. Now she’s in Budapest, waiting to meet the man she loves. But when János fails to show up for their hastily arranged rendezvous at the Liberty Bridge, Márta seeks him out at his hospital, only to be told that he has no memory of ever meeting her before.

Has Márta encountered a doppelganger? Is János just pretending not to know her? Or has she simply imagined their putative relationship, carefully conjuring “every detail so even I believe it happened”? As a student of the mind, Márta knows only too well the tricks it can play (the film opens with a quote from Sylvia Plath’s Mad’s Girl’s Love Song: “I think I made you up inside my head”).

Like the obsessive stalker of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, gripped by the delusional “erotomania” of happenstance, perhaps Márta has projected her own desires on to an unwitting subject. Or maybe, as her psychiatrist (Péter Tóth) suggests, the truth is even worse: that she longs for a diagnosis of madness to cover the altogether more mundane truth that the love of her life is actually just like all the rest: a liar, a cheat.

Horvát has cited Truffaut and Kieślowski alongside Hitchcock as key influences (the spectre of Vertigo looms large). Yet the emotional tension of this seductive psychological romance reminded me unexpectedly of Guillaume Canet’s superb French adaptation of American novelist Harlan Coben’s thriller Tell No One. Impressively, Horvát manages to keep her narrative options open for far longer than should be credible (solutions can only disappoint), with Márta and János playing an unspoken game of cat and mouse as they follow each other through a city that seems to mirror and map her internal conflicts.