Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time

A brilliant neurosurgeon is caught in a web of romantic intrigue in Lili Horvát’s seductive psychological drama

Hungarian-born Márta (Natasa Stork), an accomplished neurosurgeon with a successful career in the United States, where she has lived and worked for the last two decades, decides suddenly to return to Budapest, driven by an irresistible romantic impulse. She has met a fellow Hungarian, Dr. Janos Drexler (Viktor Bodó) at a medical conference in the States and fairly lost her (cool, rational) head. Casting her enviable career and hermetic personal life aside, she flies to Budapest to rendezvous with Janos at the Liberty Bridge, but he doesn’t show. When she manages to track him down, outside the Budapest Medical Hospital, she is blindsided when he fails to recognise her and indeed claims never to have met her.

Writer-director Lili Horvát takes her cue from classic screen protagonists caught in cycles of obsession – Kim Novak’s Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Francois Truffaut’s sublime Adèle H. (with Isabelle Adjani) and enigmatic heroines in films by Krzysztof Kieślowski (Irene Jacob in The Double Life of Veronique, Juliette Binoche in Three Colours: Blue) – to weave an elliptical, beguiling mystery drama. Cinematographer Róbert Maly’s muted tones – beautifully shot on 35mm – add considerably to the atmosphere.

– Roberta Ciabarra; Curator, Film