On Body and Soul, written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi

On Body and Soul, written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi

This is a magical film that somehow did not attract the attention of the Cannes Festival organizers, BAFTAs and the Golden Globes.

It is however nominated for an Academy Awards that is unlikely to go to this feature, in the face of competition from the more flamboyant The Square.

This Hungarian motion picture has similarities with a number of books and motion pictures that depict animal suffering, slaughter, torture and more, from Okja to Euthanizer and We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.

The setting of this intriguing, provocative film is a slaughterhouse where audiences can see, if not the actual killing, many scenes before and right after the death of innocent cattle, their insertion in the final cage, the look in their eyes, the head being severed, seconds after we have seen the living animal, in what is surely no special effect wizardry, the shots have obviously been made in an actual abattoir.

Different parts are hacked and this is correspondent to the descriptions found in the Sport of Kings, where the author describes how the animal is stunned and then his body suspended in the air and parts are detached from its body.

It is gruesome to see the amount of blood pouring out of the body of the cattle, once the head had been detached and there are insertions of these clips, with the liquids pouring from various orifices, the corpse shown from an angle, in a manner that suggests that maybe the filmmaker wanted to spare some, if not all the horror that is evidently meant to stun the public and make it mediate on this issue.

Endre and Maria are the heroes of this fabulous film, he is one of the managers of the slaughterhouse and she is a newly hired employee, a doctor in charge with inspecting the meat and assessing its quality.

The woman is rejected early on, when it is discovered that she obeys the rules in detail and classifies as B and not the best A class, flesh that colleagues feel is of the best quality…furthermore, she is a strange character, remote, reserved, we will see her in the cabinet of a psychologist who tries to help with some of her issues.

Even Endre is unhappy with her decisions, in the beginning and he talks to her about the criteria she follows when labeling the products, Maria explaining that rules decree that with more fat than two or 3 millimeters it must be class B, surprising the manager with her ability to see such small differences.

This is not her only, indeed the most amazing skill, for in later dialogue, the woman will be able to tell all the words uttered by the manager, from the first few polite exchanges to phrase number…seventeen.

The incursion into surreal territory starts with a police investigation that tries to determine who stole a mating potion from the company premises that leads to a psychological evaluation of all the employees and some incredible revelations.

Endre is invited to tell the attractive woman who is conducting the assessment when he has ejaculated first and other details that make him more than uneasy and finally to describe last night’s dream, in which he was a deer, walking in the forest with a doe, looking for leaves of grass, reaching a spring and only touching their noses, not mating as the psychologist might have anticipated.

It is beyond belief to have two people dreaming the same thing in real life, but in this feature Maria comes into the office of the evaluating woman and when the issue of last night’s dream is raised, astonishingly, we hear the same narrative of the deer and doe, the grass, the spring and all the other details.

Now the psychologist is outraged and insulted, accusing the woman in front of her of plotting this stupid scenario to mock and humiliate, in tandem with the man who had come earlier and is recorded detailing the same dream…

However, the two supposed conspirators are stupefied by the revelation and they gradually get closer to each other, with distrust because they are so different, Endre is much older and when he appears to intend to touch the younger woman and she pulls back, he explains that he had placed this side out of his mind for many years.

There are awkward and funny scenes, like the one when Maria comes to Endre, who is sitting for lunch with a colleague, the one who has actually stolen the mating composition, and she tells him he is beautiful…

Astonishingly, the identical dreams are not an isolated coincidence and the man and the woman keeping dreaming the same stories, they plan to go to sleep at the same time and after the initial miscommunication, there is an evident rapprochement, Maria finally buys a mobile phone and gradually, they become friends.

It is not at all easy, for they both have scars and disabilities, resulting at one stage in the woman abandoning this destined to fail romance, so she thinks in her depression, taking a bath with the intention of committing something drastic, opening her veins and escaping by a thread when the phone rings, she answers the call from Endre, decides to date him and all this while blood is gushing from her hand…

There are touching scenes involving Maria caressing the cattle gathered before the slaughter, the silence of these animals, which is eerie, the tender moments between very unlikely romantic heroes, the calmness, serenity, equanimity of these people who have evidently suffered so much and yet, or because of that, are destined to reach…

Nirvana!