Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time: A love mystery

Earlier this week, director Lili Horvát was named best director at the Dublin International Film Festival. And no wonder. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time takes a title more unwieldy than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and finds compelling things to do with Charlie Kaufman’s spiritually similar material.

Aged 40, neurosurgeon Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork), flies back home to Hungary from the US after years of exceptional work. She’s returning to Budapest after meeting and falling in love with another Hungarian doctor, János (Viktor Bodó), at a convention in New Jersey.

The pair, apparently smitten, strike a deal to meet at Liberty Bridge in Budapest precisely a month after they part. She keeps the promise, he doesn’t. In fact, when she finally catches up with him, he doesn’t recognise her. Is this the greatest feat of gaslighting in history? Or is something spooky going on?

Stork, in a star-making turn, plays it cool and cerebral as she returns again and again to photographs of her beloved online and rents out a stark apartment with the massive pay cut her colleagues are perplexed by. She’s no bunny boiler. Her profession, meanwhile, gestures towards a possible neurological explanation. Her circumstances, too, hint at the romantic notions of the returning migrant.

Much of the film plays out like a teasing series of mysteries. A sexual encounter may or may not be a fantasy. A courtship dance along the pavements of Budapest – in zigzag movements worthy of a Greek Weird Wave picture or exotic birds – and Robert Maly’s cinematography and Károly Szalai’s cuts keep the material improbably grounded.

The second feature by Hungarian writer-director Horvat plays in the thin space between love, madness and consciousness. There are pleasing overlaps with Alain Resnais’s Je T’aime Je T’aime and An Affair to Remember, but Preparations is unique.

Available to stream from March 19th