MIFF Session 7: PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME

Hot shot neurosurgeon Marta quits her plum job in the USA after a fellow Hungarian she met at a conference suggested they reunite on the Liberty Bridge in Budapest, on the Pest side. She gets off the plane and heads into town and there's Janos just heading home for the day. Yay! But when he turns around and sees her excited smile he blanks. Marta faints and is revived by a group of passers by, one of whom is an earnest young man who seems to have fallen instantly in love with her. Well, the only thing on her mind is Janos. Crushed, she heads back to the airport but can't shake it and runs back to Budapest because she cannot leave things this way. She gets a job at a hospital many rungs below what she got used to in America, but over the road from Janos' hospital. She works and waits. But it's not that simple.

She performs a successful brain surgery procedureon the father of the young man who helped her earlier who is a medical student (not that coincidental when you consider she fainted in the middle of the hospital dirstrict). If he was besotted at first sight he's obssessed now. Also, the big Janos himself attended her operation and congratulated her afterwards. A series of psychiatric consults reveal her outlook on the situation which is strange and apparently consolidating with every new encounter with both men. She asks the shrink for an advance on his opinion and he blunty says he thinks she has a personality disorder.

The thing is that on the one hand, the increased attention from the younger man Alex is on the verge of uncontrol and on the other, ever othertime she sees Janos in the street his hot and cold responses make things bizarre. I'd have a personality disorder at that rate. She treats Janos the way she is being treated by Alex and after one spectacular encounter Marta is both pleasantly exhausted and burdened by anxiety.

This film addresses stalking in a way I've not seen before, allowing the horror of it but also demonstrating how it might be done without the stalker's confident knowledge of their own behaviour. Now blend this in with day to day life, professional conduct and preparedness for conflict and you have something unnerving. All of this is happening (when we can say it is happening at all) in the light of day, the adversary (when there is one) is someone you can easily chat to at the same time as treat warily. You might wonder if the notion of fulfilled love is worth it, given the strain it is causing (much of it self-inflicted) but questions like that are long gone, leaving only the pursuit and that is fraught with unreality. It's not just the lack of a meet cute that prevents this from ever becoming a rom com. But then it doesn't quite try to be a thriller, either. Instead it holds a grinding middle path where whimsy and trauma are indistinguishable from each other.

Natasa Stork brings a professionalist stoicism to Marta but it's one that barely contains a storm of anxiety. She allows to see how plainly likeable Marta probably is normally but now carries a parasite of emotional poison. Viktor Bodo's Janos, is no angel in this (I won't spoil why) and brings his own peculiarities, desire and fearful hesitation lightly his bruiser features but you see it all there around his gaze which shows why he was attractive in the first place. Benet Vilmanyi has the thankless role as the unloveable, hormonal Alex who is getting unsettlingly close to acting out. 

This film's patience might make the casual viewer baulk. It makes a little over ninety minutes feel longer but the depth it navigates aided by these performances and the magnetism of Natasa Sork kept me compelled. The question of this story always sounds simpler thatn it is: what will you accept? Not just tolerate, what, finally, will you accept?