On Body and Soul

A stag trots slow­ly, majes­ti­cal­ly through a snowy wood­land glade and sets its glis­ten­ing eyes on a near­by doe. The two ani­mals encir­cle one anoth­er, get­ting close but nev­er quite con­nect­ing. Then sud­den­ly, paff, it was all a dream.

The twist is, this noc­tur­nal vision was being formed in two minds at the same time: one belongs to Endre (Géza Morcsányi), an awk­ward, mid­dle-aged fac­to­ry fore­man with one work­ing arm; the oth­er is Maria (Alexan­dra Borbély), a young, qui­et­ly intense qual­i­ty tester. Maybe the imagery that con­nects their inner con­scious­ness is a result of the fact that they work in an abat­toir and are in con­stant close quar­ters to mech­a­nised ani­mal slaugh­ter – inno­cent crea­tures being sliced to pieces. Or, per­haps, they have a more robust psy­chic con­nec­tion that can’t be quantified?

Ildikó Enyedi’s intrigu­ing and orig­i­nal film (her first of the 21^st cen­tu­ry) exam­ines this eccen­tric work­place rela­tion­ship as it evolves from an uncom­fort­able acquain­tance to the moment these two odd­balls realise they may be part of some­thing deep­er. Yet the direc­tor grounds this poten­tial­ly fan­tas­ti­cal tale in the trap­pings of the mun­dane every­day, more inter­est­ed in gaug­ing how behav­iour alters in pub­lic and pri­vate spheres. Enye­di isn’t inter­est­ed in build­ing up a mythol­o­gy or con­triv­ing a rea­son for it all, instead draft­ing the idea as a metaphor­i­cal mark­er of unlike­ly associations.

The film’s sec­ond half offers a bold and bleak vision of depres­sion caused by sti­fled feel­ings – the idea of not being able to amply express an emo­tion that’s locked inside. Endre is a sad-sack who believes that he could nev­er be phys­i­cal­ly attrac­tive to a per­son of the oppo­site sex, while Maria has pre-exist­ing issues which pre­vent her from act­ing on impulse.

Enye­di trips through these inner and out­er lives, skip­ping from ela­tion to dev­as­ta­tion in the space of an edit. She seems com­plete­ly enrap­tured by the in nite com­plex­i­ty of human biol­o­gy and the crooked archi­tec­ture of the mind.