Now showing at the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival 2021, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Lili Horvát) is also Hungary’s entry to the 93rd Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film. It tells the story of a Hungarian surgeon, Márta (Natasa Stork) who leaves her life in the US behind when she falls in love with a man called János (Viktor Bodó) at a medical conference in New York. They agree to meet in Hungary one month later, Before Sunset-style, to rekindle their budding romance. Márta shows up at their agreed meeting place, but János fails to keep up his end of the deal and denies having any memory of her when they next meet.
Márta’s world is painted with blues and greens swimming in a sea of beige, punctuated by shocks of scarlet. She bends around unending corridors and tunnels, looking for an explanation: is János lying or is she losing her grip on reality?
The film takes a refreshingly refined look at a person’s battle with consciousness, exploring the stories we weave for ourselves informed by our limited perspective. It lays out the imperfection of memory and hints at Márta’s unreliable narration, without exaggerating her potential break with reality. This amounts to a representation of a woman questioning her judgement when fact starts to elude her, but never suffering a melodramatic breakdown like those which have too often been assigned to female characters in this genre of film. Instead of escalating the tension of her dilemma, she seeks guidance, and chooses to observe the developments rather than act dangerously.
Aside from the protagonist, however, the characters in Preparations are fairly one-dimensional. The film doesn’t leave room to explore the psyche or personality of the men around Márta, choosing to focus only on her perceptions of reality, which creates a very bland landscape of characters. János is played as more of a prop than a character, used to explore Márta’s mind through his staggered presence and conspicuous absences. It is hard to identify with her central struggle of unrequited love, when the subject of this love can’t offer much more than an aloof nature. Meanwhile, Alex (Benett Vilmányi), the young medical student who tries to pursue Márta, is a shadow of a person, used only to mirror the protagonist’s circumstances. The people in Márta’s world are underdeveloped so that her journey can have space to breathe, but the film lacks substance at times, and depth of character might have gone a long way to correct that.
By and large, Preparations presents an interesting look at discrepancies between perceived realities, a fleshed-out female protagonist, and some graceful cinematography, but the lack of interesting secondary characters causes the final product to fall flat.
