Lily Horvat’s Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (PBTUPT) is a cathartic exercise meditating on what love really means. Love is longing, love is believing and above all, love is what you feel. PBTUPT is a love letter (pardon the pun) to love itself and it is truly wonderful.
PBTUPT follows Marta, a successful Hungarian neurosurgeon ex-pat who has moved to America. During a conference, she has a chance encounter with a fellow Hungarian, a man called Janos. Although they had only just met, they agreed to meet each-other on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest a month from now. Marta leaves America and flies to Hungary. She believes she has met the love of her life. However, when she arrives something is wrong, and it leads her to question everything she previously believed.
*(Spoilers from here)
PBTUPT is the most serene fever dream of a film. When Marta finds Janos, he acts as though he has never seen her before. This causes Marta to faint and hit her head off the ground. From that moment on, the film is never quite the same.
Marta begins to question much of what she is seeing throughout the remainder of the film. The audience is never quite sure that what is on screen is reality for the character, but we still learn so much about Marta even when the scene isn’t real. The scene reaches beyond a dream-like-state and almost becomes hallucinatory. Scenes where she is being followed by Janos, when he is mirroring her movement across the street from her. A scene which in a different context would be extremely creepy (think Coherence or It Follows). Here it represents her want for him to follow her, to fall for her, to want her. It is joyous and also terribly sad.
Marta begins seeing a psychiatrist when she believes she is going insane. She believes as she is a neurosurgeon she knows when she has suffered brain trauma. She is looking for an easy explanation for her illusions. However the psychiatrist believes she is suffering from a broken heart.
These scenes are shot like the fourth-wall breaking interviews of Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally. Those interviews are all about how these couples had chance meetings and fell in love. This can’t be a coincidence and it throws these scenes into a completely different light. The psychiatrist is a personification of the desires of Marta. Marta is trying to convince herself that she is insane, but she is just madly in love.
Horvat’s script isn’t exactly light on dialogue, but there is a focus on the body language of the characters. There are vast dialogue scenes focused on quite technical aspects of surgery but it is everything surrounding these dialogue scenes, like when Janos enters the surgery room when Marta is doing some complex brain surgery. She continues as normal, but her body language changes completely. Janos does also when he recognises her but it is more subtle.
At a conference towards the end of the film, there is a conversation about the inner workings of the brain and about the brain’s capacity to rationalise what it wants in context of what it can see. This is less than subtle but throughout Janos’s explanation, he is locking eyes with Marta. Horvat was clearly thinking of the image when she was writing this scene. It is very powerful and it makes you believe that Marta might not be quite so insane after all.
Robert Maly’s cinematography is essential in fulfilling the dream like stasis the film exists in. Many of the shots are from a locked tripod panning very smoothly from side to side. You feel as though the camera is floating along beside Marta as she navigates this new reality. From the moments she knows her head, the colour are most washed out, lines between colours is a bit more blurred. It seems to have taken a few queues from Woody Allen’s work, this retro style harkening back to times where it was more simple to confess your undying love.
PBTUPT is a film about unrequited love persisting in the face of all rationality. Believing that what you felt was real regardless of what your head is telling you. Lili Horvat has created one of the great films about love and desire of the last decade and you should definitely see it.
Reviewed by Jamie Waddell