Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time (2021)

Horvát’s psychological thriller about a mind on the verge

Country: Hungary

Director: Lili Horvát

Time: 1 hour and 34 minutes

Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription) and Amazon ($3.99 to rent)

What It Evokes: Love, obsession, desire, unreliable minds

A friend and I recently saw Claire Denis introduce her film Nénette et Boni (1996) in Paris as part of a larger retrospective celebrating the French film editor Yann Dedet. It’s an imperfect work from an important director. Like other Denis films, it excels at sensual shots of the human figure and subtly explores latent forms of masculine desire and violence. Her familiar use of quick cuts to visual metaphors that comment on previous scenes perhaps lacks the generative restraint of slightly later works (like the previously discussed Beau Travail), but remains quite bracing. At the talk, Denis spoke of her desire to “leave doors open” within a film, employing metaphor to underscore the ways directors facilitate and guide interpretation without fixing meaning.

Doors are both entry points and barriers. To some extent all films leave certain doors ajar, while closing others. To state the obvious, and to talk way too much about portals, the particular doors matter. To my mind, films benefit from constrained ambiguity, tethering meaning to the moving image without immobilizing it. Too few constraints on interpretation and a work becomes amorphous, suggestive of everything and nothing at once. Too many constraints—think genre works that conform almost completely to format expectations—and the obvious and predictable preside. This is a long introduction to a film that has little to do with Claire Denis, but the throughline concerns less than perfect films, genre conventions (which Denis has occasionally employed to great effect), and (forgive me) the doors a director chooses to open and close. Lili Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time is an imperfect film by a very interesting director.¹ As such, it’s well worth seeing.

A psychological thriller interested in exploring the nexus between perception, obsession, desire, and love, Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time centers on Martá, a successful neurosurgeon at a research institute in the United States, who abandons her job and returns to Budapest after developing a romantic connection with Janós, a Hungarian doctor, at a medical conference in New Jersey. Martá arrives in Budapest under the impression that the two of them had agreed to meet exactly a month after the conference at Liberty Bridge, which links Buda and Pest (metaphor alert). The problem is that Janós doesn’t show. Subsequently, Martá tracks him down at the hospital where he works. He denies ever having met or seen her before. The film’s central mystery emerges: Has Martá invented it all?

In spite of Janós’ declarations, Martá decides to remain in Budapest, taking a job at a local hospital and engineering a series of encounters between the two of them, while simultaneously becoming the object of a young medical school student’s desire. Throughout, Preparations embraces conventions familiar to the psychological thriller. The camera’s identification with a single character’s vantage allows for the undermining of an “external reality”—it’s very much the opposite effect of more presentational styles discussed in Seidl’s Paradise: Love or Nanau’s Collective. Shot in analog 35 mm (as opposed to digital or at higher resolution), the physical film’s slightly grainier quality augments Martá’s uncertainties: Has she fabricated an entire emotional bond? Does this manifest a personality disorder (for which she has begun seeking a diagnosis)? The work’s crepuscular lighting only further reinforces this lack of clarity. The total effect remains to center questions concerning desire’s potential to warp and transform the environment within which subject and object interact. If the external world—the “thing-in-itself” as philosophers sometimes call it that remains beyond our consciousness—always conforms to cognition to some degree, then the film showcases how certain forms of attraction can dramatically distort this process. (Naturally, film does this as well.)

To reinforce the point, Janós and Martá are both neurologists. In one superb scene, Martá performs brain surgery on a conscious patient struggling to produce language. In order to discover the precise extent of a tumor, Marta presses down on brain tissue as the patient attempts to name different objects displayed on cards. Millimeter differences dramatically alter discernment: the thinnest of lines exist between perception, projection, and muddle. (In a mirroring scene, Martá undergoes a Rorscharch test while seeking treatment for her potential personality disorder.) Furthermore, Janós himself is a celebrated writer. He has mastered re-presenting the world in his own way.

Throughout, the camera’s identification with Martá renders it a potentially unreliable (isn’t it always?) record of the story’s external, noumenal world. Are we (as viewers) simply inhabiting Martá’s mental projections? Neither we, nor she knows. This effect renders banal encounters (with Janós, with the young medical school student) eerie and disconcerting. Paradoxically, this proximity to the film’s central protagonist limits our information about her. Eliding Martá’s past life by grounding us completely in her immediate experience generates suspense, but curbs access to her motivations and drives. We witness desire manifest, but lack insight into its origins. The film remains interested in what Martá experiences, instead of who Martá is. It’s a very effective tactic for generating excitement and anxiety (door open), but comes at the cost of diminishing our understanding of her character (door closed). At base, this is genre at work and, in accord with the demands of the psychological thriller, the central riddle of Martá’s potential madness eventually gets resolved (door slammed).

The problem with solving puzzles is that we tend not to think about them very much once they’ve been completed. To my mind, the film sticks too closely to genre expectations and eschews a more generative exploration of character: Why would someone upend their life for this particular individual? One can obviously provide their own answers: loneliness, alienation in a foreign space, the draw of a magnetic personality, etc. Yet, none of these answers address Martá in particular. They instead explain why someone might do these things. Forming a more robust interpretation requires additional information about the character, which threatens to militate against the film’s propulsive thrust. (The suspense requires our discombobulation, not a clarifying consideration of character psychology). It’s a genre problem—the thriller almost always dominates the psychology—and its solution requires an escape from the genre’s demands. Leaving a few doors open requires (apologies again) the building of a structure (in this case character) into which we can enter. (For the record, I love works that play with genre and we’ve discussed a bunch here, here, and here. Genre tends to get a bad name because it can ground characters into types: Sam Spade is lots of fun, but he will never surprise you.)

This is not a Substack interested in criticizing films—there’s too much interesting stuff waiting to be discovered to spend time focusing on less engaging works. And Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time is a striking film worth watching. Like Denis’ Nénette et Boni, it’s full of fascinating and compelling filmmaking. Horvát draws consciously from directors like Hitchcock and David Lynch in order to create a deeply appealing psychological effect that grapples with perception, obsession, affection, desire, and madness. As a film about film—which is perhaps true of all film?—it has much to say. Its eeriness and ambiance remain deeply memorable and, like all good films, it lingers in the mind…even after those pesky doors have been closed.

Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:

Lili Horvát — The Wednesday Child (2015)

1. Obviously, there is really no such thing as a perfect film.