On Body and Soul review: A beautiful tale of love and life (in a Hungarian slaughterhouse) in this well-constructed drama from Ildiko Enydei.
On Body and Soul review by Paul Heath, Berlin Film Festival 2017.
A slaughterhouse in present day Budapest doesn’t sound like the setting for a beautiful, poetic love story, but writer/ director Ildiko Enydei‘s On Body and Soul is just that.
Financial director Endre (Morcsányi Géza) whiles away the drudging 9-5 in a stuffy office high above the lower levels where an influx of cattle meet their maker on a daily basis. His monotonous life changes one day when he spots a new face in the crowd from his office window; a beautiful young woman named Maria (Alexandra Borbely), the company’s new quality controller. Her new influence instantly changes the dynamic of the workforce, her beauty overshadowed by her serious, seemingly picky treatment of the output of the abattoir, and her downgrading of the quality of the meat affected to the nearest milometer. Maria’s world is inhabited by routine, a obscene mass of memory recall and clinical cleanness, something that she clearly embeds into her work ethic, but, when an incident at work calls for the involvement of the police and a psychologist, it is revealed that Maria shares something with Endre, an apparent spiritual connection through their dreams, and the two embark on a journey of emotion, desire, trepidation and the attempt to make those dreams come true.
On Body and Soul is a lot of things; it is stunning to look at, observational sequences of stag and foe sprinkled throughout, which are absolutely pivotal to this beautiful story, along with cleverly positioned camera work in the slaughterhouse which yes, does include some graphical content. With that though also comes a lot of humour, from Enydeli’s very well-written screenplay, and her clever direction which slowly drawn well-honed performances from his gifted lead players.
Completely score-less and largely motionless, the film skillfully blends drama with humour, tackles some pretty tough subject matter and keeps the viewer engrossed throughout. Some may feel uncomfortable during the film’s obvious unrelenting willingness to show graphic depiction of the varying stages of animal slaughter, which I felt didn’t aid the narrative at all by the way, but most will embrace its overall theme of love, loneliness and one’s place in the world.
On Body and Soul review, Paul Heath, February 2017.
On Body and Soul plays in-competition at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival.
