Is there a harsher juxtaposition than bucolic images of nature followed by bodies being slaughtered? Hungarian writer/director Ildiko Enyedi’s intensely contemplative drama On Body and Soul, which has won a slew of awards including top prize at last year’s Sydney Film Festival, begins with beautiful icy-blue shots of deer in snowy wilderness, then violently changes tempo – venturing inside an abattoir in Budapest, where cows look dolefully into the lens. We discover those images of deer enter the minds of the film’s lead characters while they sleep. Will the abattoir symbolise the death of dreams? Or the difference, perhaps, between fantasy and meat hook reality?
There’s a lot going on – and plenty of time for contemplation – in this generously paced film, which is in essence a romance between two abattoir employees: finance manager Endre (Géza Morcsányi) and new meat inspector Mária (Alexandra Borbély). Mária has a reputation for being distant and unusual, exacerbated when we witness her reenact a cafeteria conversation using salt and pepper shakers. When dangerous drugs are stolen from the premises, the subsequent investigation involves a visiting psychiatrist (Réka Tenki) who asks the employees uncomfortable questions, including what age they were when they first ejaculated.
In separate interviews, Endre and Mária relay to her details of precisely the same dream, in which the former is a stag and the latter a doe. The shrink cries foul, suspecting the pair are conspiring to play mind games. But the fact that they are occupying different bodies in the same dream is news to them. When Enyedi next returns to the scene of the deer in the forest, we think of each of the humans as we observe the animals. These majestic creatures have, in a strange way, become anthropomorphised.
Géza Morcsányi and Alexandra Borbély’s oddly entrancing performances are intentionally oblique; their characters are at least as lost in this world as we are.
In Talking World War III Blues, Bob Dylan’s 1963 song about lonely people sharing the same dream – about being isolated after an apocalypse – the singer famously concluded with the line: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” In On Body and Soul, the two principal characters have no choice. The question of why they are sharing the same dreams becomes less important than whether they will get together romantically. This leads to an unusual spin on ‘will they or won’t they?’, the traditional terrain of a rom-com – with an abstract, high-minded, surrealistic twist.
Géza Morcsányi and Alexandra Borbély’s oddly entrancing performances are intentionally oblique; their characters are at least as lost in this world as we are. For a long time the pair come across as cold and reserved, but then spiritually defrosted – not right for conventional appetites, but closer to what we expect in a drama about unusual people connecting.
Enyedi dresses up a simple storyline with moody scaffolding, taking all the time in the world to arrive at a final destination that is predictably open-ended. Viewers harbouring preconceptions about sluggish European art films will no doubt find them vindicated, though the air in On Body and Soul is hardly dry or academic. Whether audiences will be impressed by the story’s ambitious combination of subconscious thought and existentialism, and the pairing of beautiful dreams and brutal reality, is partly a matter of patience. Enyedi treats the audience with respect, entrusting them to invest time and thought in return.
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