On Body and Soul

Who would have thought that scenes of two deer, slowly moving through a snowy forest, could be so meaningful? Apart from being beautiful nature shots, there is a special meaning to them in this film, when it turns out that the two protagonists both dream of being a deer. That's the magic of cinema: to give images a deeper emotional meaning than they seem to have at first sight.

I loved everything about this film. The slightly bizarre story to begin with: two people discover that they're having the same dream every night. The way they discover this is priceless in itself. I also loved the two characters: both are slightly handicapped, one physically and the other one emotionally. Actress Alexandra Borbély is great, playing a girl with autistic spectrum disorder. And above all I loved the way the director takes her time to let the story develop: slowly but very deliberately, taking care of every small meaningful detail.

This is a very tender movie. The viewer can't help but sympathize with these two lonely people, both trying so hard to understand each other. It's making a great case for human dignity, mutual understanding and tolerance.

Snowfall in a forest of firs, gentle wind, the soothing sound of flowing water and two deer nuzzling in the mist. Endre and Maria are fastidious loners and mere acquaintances, yet they share this recurring dream. Though Maria has extreme difficulty with physical contact, she strives to overcome this limitation with her vivid imagination and immense desire. The mutual and expanding dreams tug at the pair, body and soul, but so do their fears, obsessions and predilections for solitude.

I loved the sensual nature of the film and the two main characters who delight in little things such as the warmth of sunlight and the brushing of hair with a hand. Close-up photography, of faces, reflections in the water and more, adds another layer of sensuality to the film. Both Endre and Maria work in a slaughterhouse and while the story does not dwell for too long in the raw bloodshed of this, it is enough to make you vow to become a vegetarian. I appreciate the film's slant on the subject, which Endre gives voice to in telling a candidate for a job at the slaughterhouse, "if you don't feel sorry for the cows, you can't work here." The character chemistry seems a little off, as Endre appears much older and uglier than Maria, but maybe it is just me. Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Beautiful. Moving. Funny. Touching. Magical. Shocking. Wonderful. A film for grown-ups with hearts and minds. The direction - the shots, the camera-work, the framing - are a pleasure: one admires parts of the film as one does a painting. The acting is so natural as to forget one is not watching a real life scene. The script is elegant and sparse - there is so much left unsaid; it's the space between the words that count. The all encompassing vision makes one proud to be a human being.

ON BODY AND SOUL is an invigorating comeback of Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, her first feature film in 18 years which stimulatingly dances away with the Golden Bear in Berlin.

The plot can be basically boiled down as follows: when a lonely man meets a lonely woman, how the pair fumbles to build an authentic connection without forfeiting their individuality, because both are crippled in very different terms, for a middle-aged Endre (Morcsányi), it is his corporal handicap, a liability which might explain why he is a singleton, but for the young Maria (Borbély), her condition is far more unusual and intriguing, she seems to be stuck in a limbo of emotionally arrested development, equipped with no social skills, and eschews human contact of any sort, but in accordance with the less unconventional "idiot savant" trope, she is also endowed with a preternatural power of memory, which might fairly explain her credentials as a quality inspector, newly appointed to work in Endre's abattoir, where he assumes the job as the chief financial officer.

Despite of its well-trodden narrative arc, ON BODY AND SOUL refreshingly channels a mystical dream-reality correlation between the two protagonists, embodied in their shared dreamscape as a stag and a doe and through a subplot of psychological assessment, its earth-shattering revelation is comically underlined by Klára (a voluptuous Réka Tenki and an uncanny Jennifer Lawrence doppelgänger), the psychiatrist who is in a snit of believing that she has been taken for a ride (indeed, comical elements are friskily deployed throughout). It is this paranormal tie-in propels their bonding in motion, which reverberates as a sobering call, how could these two isolated souls even start a tentative gesture if there were no such beggar belief fabrication to break the humongous glacier between them, one must venerate Enyedi for her keen insight of the intrinsic difficulty apropos of human interactions, and her diligent craftsmanship of balancing the dream- reality dyad with an intimate but non-judgmental outlook amid the film's gorgeous imagery.

It is still a bumpy road ahead after that, not least for the tabula-rosa Maria, who really steps out of her comfort zone and out on a limb to prepare herself for the ineluctable carnal ritual, but at the same time, her gawkiness sends many a wrong signal to an increasingly frustrated Endre, who is self-aware of their gaping age difference and dubious of his own potency. When the crunch comes Enyedi doesn't flinch from radically bringing a splurge of red into play, even if it offends the squeamish, which is not dissimilar with the slaughterhouse mise-en-scène, viewers are impelled to stare at pain and gore vis-à-vis, because cruelty is the staple among human beings, whether we (sometimes even obliviously) cast it on our own kind or lesser beings.

The two leading performances are of high caliber, dramaturgist Géza Morcsányi is well at ease with Endre's resigned, contemplative demeanor tinged with a smidgen of sophistication, whereas a doe-eyed (no puns intended!) Alexandra Borbély is simply mesmerizing to hold our attention from stem to stern, often appears like an ethereal creature with her impassive lineaments, and registers her unaffected agenda at the same time in pinpoint economy.

Mournfully honed in Laura Marling's WHAT HE WROTE, the thematic dirge bewitches Maria and audience alike, ON BODY AND SOUL reaches its crescendo with a hard-earned happy ending, when magic dissipates, a new lease on life is inaugurated, which could be also read as a herald of Enyedi's own future, career-wise. In fact, she is a few years younger than Géza Morcsányi in real life, so guaranteed by this fascinating love story, her next offering looks pretty buoyant, with only one proviso, the waiting time must be significantly pared down, an 18-year hiatus is an egregious waste of her talent.

First things first: DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILERS they spoil the story.

And what a story it is! Slow, vulnerable, awkward, beautiful, painful. You can smell the sweat and blood and life.

The movie may be too intimate and fallible for some prople, though all those uneasy details add to the story and the feeling. It peaks in chatarsis multiple times during the movie, still the ending is a bit too obvious for my taste (especially when in contrasts to the previous 90 minutes as the movie cleverly and slowly evolved and expanded) Still this is a masterpiece: multilayered, well acted, well shot. Bruising yet uplifting. What more one may ask from a movie.

Update: initially I rated this 9/10 due to some nitpicking on technical issues like pacing at the end. After a week of haunting images, memories and feelings in its wake, I say this movie is the real deal: so here it is 10/10 (like M. Lazhar.)