On Body and Soul: no room to dream

On Body and Soul is a movie going the wrong way of the cinema. Little is said about feelings. The symbolic dimension is replaced by a concreteness that leaves no room for dreams, except for a single one, which the protagonists share.

Endre and Mária, a middle-aged financial director and a young quality inspector work in a slaughterhouse. Their solitary lives can be seen in the intimacy of their apartments through contrasts: the dark interior, illuminated only by the TV light of the man's apartment, and a bright light in the girl's. He, who has paralysis in his left arm, seems to avoid life perhaps not to repeat some pain. She does not get any kind of social skills or physical contact because she's plunged into an autistic spectrum.

In the dream that they live together unknowingly, discovered at random by a skeptical psychiatrist, a stag and a doe walk through a frozen forest in search of food. The scenery is bleak and only what unites them also keeps them alive. Far away, in real life, a crowd of well-fed cattle waits patiently in line at the slaughter. This is done in a clear and revealing way: bodies are beheaded and dismembered in a bloodbath that runs down the floor.

Endre and Mária share their dreams as they tell the episode of a sitcom watched the day before. He is confined to an emotional involvement because he does not want to delude himself. She does not even know how to do it. However, by talking to his child therapist, and reworking the lived scenes with Lego mini-figures in his apartment, he begins to learn to exert his sensory skills.

The director Ildikó Enyedi manages to lead this paradox in a dry way, as the characters do, but in a calm mood like the look of an ox that is no longer butchered because the siren signaled the end of the shift.

In the moment of greater pain, which is also felt by the audience, when the sum of all anxiety is experienced as inexorable anguish, something happens and shuffles the opposites. It is not a happy ending as it is known. The dream empties.

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