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

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

Available to watch on Curzon Home Cinema

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