On Body and Soul (2017)

Director: Ildikó Enyedi

Screenplay: Ildikó Enyedi

Cast: Géza Morcsányi as Endre; Alexandra Borbély as Mária; Réka Tenki as Klára; Zoltán Schneider as Jenő; Ervin Nagy as Sanyi; Itala Békés as Zsóka

After a hiatus of eighteen years, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi returned back with a success, On Body and Soul the 2017 Golden Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival, and was nominated for the Best Foreign (International) Oscar. Befitting the director of My 20th Century (1989), an idiosyncratic debut crossing together separated twin sisters to Thomas Edison's light bulbs, On Body and Soul is a growing romance tale which takes place at an abattoir, in which a significantly older male chief financial officer Endre (Géza Morcsányi) and a very introverted quality inspector Mária (Alexandra Borbély) develop a connection due to a shared dream, finding themselves continually dreaming they are a deer and a doe respectably in a winter snow covered woodland.

Shot in an abattoir, all septic white and cold, with their connection pushed together when someone steals medical goods for mating the cattle, I will warn viewers there are scenes with real cows being killed and cut up for meat. The images of a slaughterhouse and the real place, (i.e. including smell and spatial environment), do differ for me but I will make the reader aware of this out of warning. On Body and Soul also, depending on how you view Mária, is one of the best depictions of a learning/mental disability even if it is never explicit on the story about her. A new staff member with an uncanny ability of memory recall, but called "Snow White" by colleagues who view her like one might do an actual alien, Mária's characterisation is fascinating from this perspective.

Quiet, nervous and able to remember even the twelfth sentence spoken to her, Mária became interesting for me, as a viewer born with autism as an avatar for being an adult with learning disabilities, when we see she still goes to counselling. She has, amusingly, still gone to the consoler for children (due to the location looking like a children's room and he asking her if she preferred someone else), but that was where the idea came into consideration. Distant from everyone due to extreme shyness, able to describe how one's dilating eyeballs can tell if they are lying or not but with difficult able to communicate, as if this skill was instead learnt by her artificially than naturally in adaptation, she is blatantly an isolated person but it is only with context it comes off as written as someone on the autistic spectrum.

As someone who also has a pedantic and vital talent, extremely good at her work that complaints about her reducing the beef to class B comes from her being able to tell its far fatter than regulation by mere inches, she could have easily become a distant character were it not for how in depth to film deals with her as a figure and the world around.  Almost alien to anyone else, she is only really able to express herself using (of all things) PlayMobil toys by herself to figure out how to talk to people like Endre next time, a more extreme case of a disability than myself in my own personal take on the film. The bond grows only part of the way through between Endre and Mária due to accident, a psychologist brought in due to the consideration the theft of under the counter hormones might have some sexual hang-up in place, which means that this potential romance is one that is awkward and takes a long time to actually develop as the dream is the only initial connection. Alexandra Borbély's performance is the best regardless of fan interpretation; hers alongside the script is a hell of a superior take on such a figure if you did describe it as such, even as a proxy interpretation of a disability superior than many films about disabled characters which are cloying, saccharin, patronising or squander potential by becoming all the above.

Beyond this, On Body and Soul follows the virtue of world cinema of pure unpredictability, a romantic drama in the least expected of places and in an unfamiliar world, with a foot firmly planting into reality, a starkly shot drama, and the other in the ethereal with the serene scenes of the deer. The cast beyond Borbély , especially Géza Morcsányi as Endre, are just as strong which adds a credibility to this entire premise without it coming off as absurd. Everything is ordinary and characters are far from perfect, such as the running gag of one of Endre's co-workers and a friend who is a larger middle age man, who says man have control over woman in the typical chauvinistic manner, only for his relationship to his wife clearly the opposite but still an existing one.  It is amazing to think, in On Body and Soul's balance of incredibly black humour and emotional depth, which the film manages to go through some incredibly dark humour and frankness in its disarmingly quiet tone. There is an Oscar nominated film now because of this one, even over Dogtooth (2009), that following the joke Mária watches porn to understand how sex works, you get images of actual hardcore porn explicitly shown in the background to one scene, managing to make it come off as a quiet amusing surprising as the film succeeds in finding a balance between its eccentricities and its warmth.

As a result, the film can be both hilarious at points but also utterly emotional even within the same plot point. Like a cousin to Argentinean director Martin Rejtman, who continually made jokes involving heavy metal in his films, a gag about Mária trying to find "love music" starts with death metal, only for the song found as a result of the scene tying into when heartbreak takes place and a very close to the bone, and uncomfortably realistic, attempted suicide with wrist cutting happens in the last act. (Again, I'll warn the viewer about this whilst wondering how the practical effects creator made it look realistic on an actor completely naked during the scenes.) Comparing back to My 20th Century, an incredibly stylish and magical fantasy film shot in monochrome, On Body and Soul is a much more subdued work in tone but you can tell it is the same filmmaker here. Something very unpredictable underneath it surface that, to confess something, I openly had a chance to see much earlier ago from when I covered this only to turn off after a few minutes, a lack of patience which I can thankfully rectify with the statement that On Body and Soul is a very good film. An exceptional one to add weight to this, from a director whose work is sadly not as well seen but will hopefully reap that benefits that this production's success (and a restored and available version of My 20th Century) for the better.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None