After last week’s testing of the waters, we head into our official Noirvember coverage with a dreamy, melancholy Hungarian film that lives on the permeable borderline between genres.
The Onion once ran the headline “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested,” because high-concept romantic comedies, in particular, rely on our willingness to believe that these characters are, despite the sometime-criminal absurdity of their actions, speeding towards a happy ending that will retroactively justify everything; not only are we expected to have faith in them, we’re expected to accept that, on some level, they have faith in each other, that they’re able to read past the myriad miscommunications and misunderstandings and feel what’s important. Hildy Johnson doesn’t really want to marry her dull fiancé and leave the newspaper business, and Walter knows that despite her protestations, and we’re supposed to go along with that, because we know they’re meant to be together.
Lili Horvát’s Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time destabilizes that kind of knowledge, and it gives that Onion headline a queasy horror to go along with the joke. It’s a bit like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend without the songs.
Márta (Natasha Stork) is a successful neurosurgeon; though Hungarian by birth, she lives and works in New Jersey, at the very hub of her field. Then one day, she gives up her life and flies back to Budapest, where she’s due for a romantic rendezvous with Janós (Viktor Bodó). The two of them met at a conference, and the connection between them was instant, palpable, and powerful. They didn’t even trade numbers, Márta explains: they only made plans to reunite on a Budapest bridge at a specific date and time.
It does sound like a classic love story, sort of like a better-fated Brief Encounter crossed with Linklater’s Before trilogy and a WWII romance like The Clock. Stork plays Márta’s retelling of it like she’s run through their story many times before, in practice for telling it to friends, to eventual children. The actual memory, perhaps, has been replaced by the memory of the reminisce, which always has different colors and shading.
And Janós doesn’t come to the bridge. And when Márta tracks him down, he says they’ve never met.
On the verge of retreating back to America in lovelorn humiliation, Márta suddenly pivots and chooses to stay, taking a lower-paying, lower-prestige position at a local hospital and renting a shitty apartment with only one plus: a view of the bridge. Back and forth she goes from job to home, nursing her obsession.
Stork gives her both a fragility and a preternatural stillness, and both qualities combine to make you feel like she could break open to anything at any moment. Violence? (When she scrolls back through conference photos—a break from watching YouTube footage of child Janós’s recital—and finds a shot that captures her turned in her seat, staring at him fixedly, my wife exclaimed, “She looks like an It Follows!”) Renewal? (She has an off-kilter flirtation with a med student after performing life- and self-saving surgery on his father; the student, too, believes in love at first sight, love past communication. Do we believe his version of “just knowing”? Do we believe hers?) Further heartbreak? (There are many beautiful sequences here, but my favorite may be when Márta calls Janós and waits through “Für Elise” hold music, which poignantly shifts from diegetic to scoring as the film transitions to showing her simply going about her business, her whole life on hold.)
Horvát’s best move here is resolving one of the key questions but not tension that goes with it. Márta’s therapist, asked for an honest reaction to her story as well as an honest diagnosis, is blunt in a way she doesn’t expect. Maybe her worst fear isn’t that she’s ill enough for a catastrophic, life-altering fantasy; maybe it’s that the truth is far more mundane, that all this comes down to an mismatch in flirting styles, to a misreading of significance, to adultery, to disappointment. Maybe it would be better to be maddened than to exist, sanely, in a world that cannot reward her dreams. But even knowing the truth of the past, the film suggests, doesn’t help us handle the future. All those preparations, and we can’t even know the amount of time. The film’s final image is a perfect symbol of love in its early uncertainties, its unlikely, dizzying beauty matched only by how perilous it all is. How long can someone choose to believe?
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is streaming on Kanopy and Tubi.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Astronaut survival rating: two out of five stars. You may survive, but you'll wish you hadn't.
Anthologized
This professor is history.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Serial Experiments Lain, Episode Right, “Rumours”
Incredible turn and revelation this episode, with a very strong plot – Lain meets God (or a creature that claims to be Good, under specific definitions), and then finds everyone is suspicious of her committing an unknown crime, then discovers a doppelganger of her on the Internet released information that a classmate is sleeping with a teacher, and then she somehow deletes that memory in everyone but finds her doppelganger replacing her in reality!
I think what it’s suggesting – in a much more explicit way than this show normally is – is that we can end up seeing people on the Internet as extensions of ourselves in unhealthy ways. There also this idea mixed in of a true self to us that the Internet can reveal – makes sense to me – as well as persona we can make. Lots to chew on.
Live Music – a total bucket-list gig right here. I’ve loved The Radio Dept for years but missed ever seeing them live and then they disappeared for a long time. This was only their 4th show of the decade, after a short run in Denmark and their native Sweden last month. It required me to make a 6hr round trip to London on a work night and get home at 2:30am, but I knew I had to do it! The venue, Koko, was also pretty cool – although in a classic London way, the crowd talked over much of the support act Ana Roxanne, annoyingly. She was good, very minimal, dreamy, slow music that could definitely have appeared on an episode of Twin Peaks. But obviously I was there for the headliners and they were fantastic, the set felt like it was over incredibly quickly even though they played for about 75 minutes. I would have loved to see them play more from their earlier years – they played all of their (relatively) recent singles but we did get a few classics too. Hopefully this return to action will lead to a new album, if nothing else it has made me absolutely fucking exhausted and grumpy today, worth it though.
Woo, live music! Good band that I first heard on Marie Antoinette’s amazing soundtrack (along with Gang of Four, New Order, etc.)
Great soundtrack!
Reggie Dinkins S2 premiere – “Y2K is here! Everyone bury your money in the woods!” “I’m a teenager in 2026, of course I know Eagle Eye starring Michelle Monhagan and Billy Bob Thornton.” “GUANTANAMO SPACE JAIL!” Brina could yell at me all day, frankly. Good premiere and Carmelo was underutilized last season so it’s great to see him get the seeming main *dramatic* plot here. (Using Arthur’s emphasis.) Good to have you back, Reggie.
The 49th Parallel – The survivors of an U-Boat sunk in Hudson’s Bay try to make their way south to a still neutral United States, but the Canadians they meet along the way will not allow it! Directed by Michael Powell and writte by Emil Pressburger (but not strictly speaking by The Archers), this one looks very good of course (Freddie Young behind the camera, young David Lean as editor) and has some fairly well done set pieces. And it’s always fascinating to watch a WWII film made during the war. But even though I agree with what the movie is saying about the Nazis, it’s still propaganda and generally unsubtle. Credit, though, for making one of the German unsure of the whole Deutschland Uber Alles thing without becoming the post-war “Good German” trope. A few big names here – Olivier somewhat weirdly as a French Canadian, Ralph Bellamy as an AWOL Canadian soldier, and a young Glynis Johns as a Hutterite girl whose parents were victims of the Nazis – but the better performances are by the relative unknowns as the Nazis.
Elementary, “Meet Your Maker” – A woman who makes her living doing fin-dom play goes missing, and her clients (one an incel who otherwise hates women) are worried. Turns out she and her boyfriend also make money making bespoke ghost guns and a drug gang has kidnapped them. The fin-dom stuff feels like it was put there to be titillating – I suspect this was the first time many viewers heard of the idea – but it really does tie into things. Meanwhile, Sherlock has nudged the US Marshals to recruit Marcus, and surprisingly, Marcus likes the idea, suggesting he will leave the show. I have no idea if this will happen, but given the rather steady status quo of the show, it would be surprising. Some interesting asides: Marcus quips after his girlfriend says she think s”Marshal Bell” has a nice ring that so would “Dr. Bell,” but he’s not going to med school. This is a clear shout-out to the source of his name, Dr. Joseph Bell, who was an inspiration for Sherlock Holmes; a couple costumed as the stereotypical Holmes and Watson as some sort of “makers fair;” and Holmes noting that when trying to find a good challenge for Marcus he ruled out ICE because it would be an ideological mismatch. Without being blatant about it, and without losing the usual level of copaganda, the writers are acknowledging how things have changed in Trump I.
Sounds From a Town I Love — Several quick snippets of New Yorkers walking down the street delivering funny dialogue into their cell phones. Maybe it seems a little hokey now, but at the time it felt an important demonstration of normalcy.
Hollywood Ending — Wan.
Allen plays a washed up film director who had the pulse of New York in the ‘80’s but now can’t get a job, until his studio-exec ex-wife (Téa Leoni) convinces her boyfriend/boss (Treat Williams) to give him a great New York script the studio has developed. Unfortunately, due to the stress of the situation Allen develops psychosomatic blindness right as the shoot begins, which he has to hide from everyone so he doesn’t get fired.
It’s not a terrible idea, but as produced it doesn’t have the verve of Allen’s typical work. In particular, the weak link is Allen himself as the lead. This is his last leading role in one of his features, and it’s clear it’s time. His performance style of nervous tics and nebbishy asides, which have never bothered me like they bothered Ned Flanders (and my daughter), finally obscure the character he’s supposed to be. I thought he did fine as the lead in Curse of the Jade Scorpion just last week/last year (his chemistry with the younger love interests aside), but maybe the period setting compensated for it in that picture. Here his performance is occasionally funny but certainly is not slick.
Which is too bad because a lot of the rest of it works. Leoni is great, playing her part very naturalistically even amid the chaos, and given the history of their relationship (which would have started when he was a middle-aged tyro and she was just off the farm), the age difference itself doesn’t seem so implausible. Williams does a nice job as that rare creature in film, a fairly reasonable studio head, and George Hamilton and Mark Rydell (more typically a director than actor) both have funny turns as a shallow La-La-Land associate producer and Allen’s agent who is in on the secret. (There is less New York vs. L.A. commentary than you would expect with this premise, as it focuses more on the farcical business around Allen’s blindness and, to a lesser extent, the love triangle. But what there is comes out of Hamilton’s mouth, and it’s pretty good.) Also, the picture looks gorgeous, with last-minute replacement Wedigo von Schultzendorff (IMDB says it’s a real person!) covering every shot in golden honey.
Allen has said this is one of the films that came out most closely to the vision (irony!) he had while he was writing it. But this viewing confirmed my previous attitude that it’s the worst movie he’s ever directed. Even with these problems, though, it’s hardly terrible. It’s sort of charming and sweet by the end, and there are a fair number of laughs even as the premise never delivers in the way we would have hoped. And in a way it is this film that has justified this retrospective project, because if this is the nadir then I’m doin’ pretty good.
This sounds intriguing! Onto the watchlist it goes.
I think you’ll like this! Incredible atmosphere.
There’s an Audrey Tautou movie, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, I watched for a class (for some reason) that doesn’t totally work in my memory, but has the neat premise of Tautou’s character being madly in love with a married doctor while making increasingly psychotic decisions…then the perspective flips around to reveal the doctor doesn’t know her at all and she’s projected all of these feelings onto him.
I should check that out! I like how this one has occasional moments that implicitly point out that regardless of the truth of how all this started–and like I said, that does eventually get resolved–there’s something inherently risky and strange about going to such extremes, something that puts her subtly out-of-place with the people around her: her new boss, for example, is both sympathetic and derisive when he guesses she’s done all this for a man, and then it becomes obvious later that he assumes she’s at least done it for a man she’s already dating.
Year of the Month updates:
This November, you can write about anything from 1968 — here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Black Lizard
TBD: Cameron Ward: Horus, Prince of the Sun
Nov. 6th: Gillian Nelson: Never a Dull Moment
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 13th: Gillian Nelson: Understanding Stresses and Strains
Nov. 19th: John Bruni: The Swimmer
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
And then we’ll be wrapping up 2026 with a look back at 2020! That was a great year for everybody, right? Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Dec. 4th: Gillian Nelson: The Owl House
Dec. 11th: Gillian Nelson: Prop Culture
Dec. 25th: Gillian Nelson: COVID closings at the Disney parks