“Preparations to Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time” (M) ***

THIS is Hungary’s nomination in the Best Foreign Language category at this year’s Oscars. How will it fare on the big night? 

For me, and the couple sitting a row down at its first Canberra screening, the consensus was not optimistic. When the lights came up after it was over, we enjoyed recognising each other after a few years. And we agreed that it is not the easiest of movies to classify or comprehend.

Neuro-surgeon Marta (Natasa Stork) is waiting on a Budapest sidewalk for the man with whom she made a date a month earlier in New York, where she had been working in a major hospital. 

Janos (Viktor Bodo) may be there at the appointed place and time, but he denies having ever seen her. This is the first unexpected moment in writer/director Lili Horvat’s gentle but uncompromising film. 

The drama unfolds at a leisurely pace. It offers no excitement as we meet Marta’s colleagues and friends, each with their own agenda. It calls a spade a spade, yet delivers no simple resolution of any of the conundrums that it dangles before our eyes. 

In her early 40s, Marta’s needs may be simple, but how she fulfils them brings their own problems. They are of the flesh as much as of the spirit. 

The film’s 10-word-long title may sharpen our anticipation that its words and images on the screen will resolve our curiosity about what it’s trying to tell us. But there’s no rule that it must eventually deliver a cogent explanation. Which, in a way, it does.

At Dendy