On October 12, the Hungarian film "On Body and Soul" by Ildikó Enyedi is released - the love story of two people who dream the same. Picture Enyedi received the main prize of the Berlin Film Festival.
Deer is simple. A male and a female met in the winter forest. Sniffed each other, drank water from a frosty stream and shared a rotten leaf. Not like humans. They need to meet, talk and communicate. Do not be afraid to touch each other or say something personal. Invite to dinner, especially to visit. In life, or at least in thought, everyone passed through the hell of these conventions - the inevitable obstacles in the way of one person to another. How and why does a stranger become close? Writing a book about it (a poem, a picture and a symphony) is terribly difficult. After all, the most important thing remains hidden, not shown and not spoken. Making a movie is even harder. Actually, it is almost impossible. However, Ildikó Enyedi succeeded.
An unprecedented story happened at the Berlin Festival. The seemingly non-modern and certainly not political film of the 61-year-old Hungarian art director "On Body and Soul" suddenly turned out to be the leader of the competitive race. It happened unexpectedly, on the last festival day. Enyedi, who has not filmed a full-length movie for 18 years, was not considered a favorite. If only the main jury showed eccentricity, giving the "Golden Bear" its declaratively modest love story, but literally everyone came to the same result. The jury of critics of the FIPRESCI, the Ecumenical jury and the jury of readers of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper (in other words, ordinary viewers) proclaimed "On Body and Soul". It seems that this happened for the first time in history. It is not surprising that today "On Body and Soul" represents Hungary at both the European Film Academy Award and the Oscar.
The main character is a middle-aged, phlegmatic man, a disabled person (he is a dry-witted) and a loner, the CFO of a meat-processing plant. The heroine, a silent perfectionist blonde, is a meat quality inspector. Between them, there is nothing in common, except dreams, but both of them are not aware of this for the time being. The action takes place in two equal spaces - let 97% of screen time be given to one of them, and no more than 3% to the second. We spend most of the picture at the slaughterhouse near Budapest, but sometimes we fall into a dream reality where deer roam the woods. Obvious and spectacular counterpoint: some beautiful horned animals quietly enjoy freedom (in a dream), others compose their heads without fear on a boring death conveyor belt (in reality). The themes of the film are also elementary: love and death.
Amazingly, Enyedi is impossible to present a classic (as a rule, fair) claim in typical for art cinema speculations on the suffering and death of animals. In some places her film is rather difficult to watch, but from an ethical point of view, "On Body and Soul" is a gesture close to flawless. Enyedi and her film crew took root in a real slaughterhouse and filmed her everyday life with the permission of the staff and management. No animal was injured in the name of the film; on the contrary, the daily sufferings of animals were immortalized in this not sentimental, but deeply humanistic picture of how little differences there are between deer and cows. In addition, between cows and people. Both are doomed to death and loneliness. In addition, that, and others, no one will come to the rescue. Only the gaze of another (or camera) is able to briefly inject the soul into the body sentenced to suffering.
With all this, "On Body and Soul" is not a metaphysical parable, but a comedy at home (ok, let it be a tragicomedy). In the film a lot of absurd and funny, touching and accurate. Enyedi is tolerant of the eccentricities of his autistic heroes, but sees no reason to smooth out or hide their neuroses. Sometimes love requires uncompromising, not just forgiveness. Especially, if we are talking not only about the love of a man and a woman, but also about the love of the author for his characters.
Ingmar Bergman once said about Tarkovsky that an indicator of a director’s talent is the ability to painlessly overcome the line between reality and sleep. In the first Enyedi films, the artists Tarkovsky played Oleg Yankovsky in "My 20th Century", Alexander Kaidanovsky in "Magic Hunter". Nevertheless, there is nothing in common with the majestically detached manner of the russian genius in her paintings. They are ironic and tender, they are about the small, not the great. Perhaps that is why at some point it turns out that they are today more important than any art that claims so-called relevance.
I haven't managed to see this yet... I know it is supposed to be a great movie, but so many other stuff I want to watch instead of this. So hard to start on this movie, but I hope I will be able to! It is so much easier to just watch a good comedy or an action movie, and bypass movies like this one....
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