Synopsis
On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, 2017) is Ildikó Enyedi's Hungarian romance with a thread of the surreal, available to watch online on iFILM. It unfolds inside a Budapest slaughterhouse, where two withdrawn coworkers find talking harder than silence.
Endre is the plant's aging financial director, his left arm paralysed. Mária is the new quality inspector, exact to the millimetre and flinching from any touch. By day they barely manage a sentence. By night, though, they dream the very same dream: a stag and a doe wandering a snowbound forest, drinking from the same frozen stream, searching for each other. When a workplace questionnaire reveals they share that dream down to the detail, neither knows what to do with it. Carrying that woodland tenderness into daylight turns out to be slow, awkward, sometimes unbearable work.
Enyedi sets the gentlest of love stories against the bluntest backdrop imaginable, and lets the contrast do the talking. The film took the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, with Alexandra Borbély playing Mária so precisely that her discomfort leaks straight into the room. Strange, hushed, and tender without a grain of sugar. Stream On Body and Soul (2017) online on iFILM.
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