Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time
Directed by Lili Horvát
Running time: 1hr34 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Natasa Stork stars in Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time
“Gaslighting” is a term brought into being by the movies, named as it was for the mental torment Ingrid Bergman portrayed to Oscar-winning effect in the 1944 hit Gaslight, as her husband's escalating deceit undermined her own sense of sanity. It's on the internet that its meaning has shifted into a mere synonym for lying. A shadowy, spidery modern-day melodrama that, with a couple of adjustments, could well have been tailored for Ingrid Bergman once upon a time, Preparations To Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time is a romance-by-gaslight that both hews to the original sense of the term and teases out other possibilities.
Marta (Natasa Stork), a brilliant Hungarian neurosurgeon living in New York, meets a fellow doctor and compatriot at a conference, falls head over heels for him, and agrees to a Budapest rendezvous. When she shows up, he claims to have no idea who she is, and thus begin the psychological gymnastics. Is he a cad, or is she a stalker? Is she being gaslit by a man or her mind? Hungarian director Lili Horvát keeps any number of uncertainties afloat in a dazzling second feature that merges the fragrantly saturated melodrama of Douglas Sirk with Hitchcock-cool noir, though she prefers to deconstruct her mystery woman from the inside out.
The neurosurgeon who can't trust her own brain: it sounds like the kind of hackneyed irony that could power a far tackier B-movie. Yet the longer Horvát probes her heroine's crush, and the romantic misadventures that spiral from it, the closer this fascinating film comes to an observation less sinister and more universal: love is a madness into which our emotions trick us, a gas flame that can flicker out.
PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME (2020) Written by Lili Horvát | Shot by Robert Maly | Edited by Károly Szalai