A neuro-surgeon takes a job at a hospital to be near the man she loves,
who fails to acknowledge her.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Lili Horvat
Starring: Natasa Stork, Viktor Bodo, Benett Vilmanyi
A contender for the year's most unwieldy title, writer/director
Lili Horvát's
Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
is an often confounding mix of psychological thriller and romantic
drama. When it's keeping us guessing as to its true nature, it makes for
a gripping watch, but once it plays its hand our interest quickly
erodes.
In her first lead role, Natasa Stork is enthralling as Marta, an
eminent Hungarian neuro-surgeon who has been practicing in New Jersey
for the past few years. Marta has returned to Budapest, prompted by an
encounter with a Hungarian surgeon, Janos (Viktor Bodó, a Beau
Bridges to Russell Crowe's Jeff) at a conference in New Jersey. The pair
had agreed to meet a month later at the Pest end of the city's Liberty
Bridge, but Marta finds herself stood up. Convinced that Janos might be
"the one", Marta tracks him down at the hospital where he practices, but
Janos denies having ever met her before.
Is Janos lying to Marta, or is she lying to herself, and subsequently
to the therapist she relates her romantic and psychological woes to? She
seems convinced of her encounter with Janos, though there's a glint of
madness behind her eyes which grows more intense the closer she gets to
Janos. Determined to hook up with the hunky surgeon, Marta quits her
position in New Jersey, and much to the dismay of the Hungarian medical
community, takes a position well below her pay grade at the same
hospital where Janos is employed in order to be close to him.
Complicating things is the intrusion of Alex (Benett Vilmányi), a
young medical student who falls for Marta after she performs life-saving
surgery on his father.
For its opening half, Preparations... plays out in
thriller mode. There's lots of Hitchcockian stalking as Marta observes
Janos from a distance, and the ambiguity of their relationship is
riveting. Stork possesses the ability to say a lot merely with a glance,
the sort of actor beloved by editors as their blank expression can be
manipulated to convey a variety of emotions depending on the images
they're juxtaposed with.
Once the cat is let out of the bag and Horvát clues us in to just what
is really playing out here, it's as though she jabbed a switchblade into
a tire, the tension releasing far too quickly and leaving us to watch
passively as the drama plods to a conclusion that most of us –
particularly women, I suspect – will consider and unearned.
While ultimately something of a misfire,
Preparations... does introduce us to a fearsome new talent
in Stork and a potentially great filmmaker in Horvát, though on the
evidence here, the latter may be better suited to focusing on directing
scripts by other writers.
