On Body and Soul

The introverted Maria and her new colleague Endre discover by chance that they share the same dream night after night. Confused and astonished by this intimate connection, they tentatively seek each other's company... In the Hollywood classic “Pillow Talk” (1959), there is a wonderful scene with the “dream couple” Doris Day and Rock Hudson: the romantic comedy, shot in CinemaScope format, uses the entire width of the picture to divide it into two equal parts side by side; Day and Hudson lie in their chic bathtubs, talking on the phone - and each lift one leg out of the bath foam so that their feet touch exactly at the line where the two scenes meet. There is no such split-screen technique in “Body and Soul” by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, and yet at least one shot of the film is reminiscent of it: Mária and Endre have finally found each other and are lying next to each other in the bedroom, dreaming their enigmatic and mysterious dream together, Mária in the right half of the picture in bed, Endre in the left half at her feet. They are also close to each other and yet separated by a fine imaginary line that they have not (yet) crossed. “Body and Soul” is an admirable feat in which form and content come together in rare mastery. Ildikó Enyedi tells the story of a tender love that betrays her love of storytelling in every “pore”, in every finely composed shot. And for cinema. As bleak as the settings are at times, the story flows subtly into a utopian world in which you can immerse yourself in your dreams together. Such a kindred spirit meets the loners Mária and Endre completely unexpectedly, and yet they cannot escape this coincidence. Endre is the financial director of a slaughterhouse in Budapest. He is only too happy to avoid the cold, aseptic world of the slaughterhouse, the sad looks of the doomed cows and the hanging raw meat and hides away in the office. Nevertheless, the gentle man with a crippled arm has retained his interest in his fellow human beings, including the new quality inspector Mária, who his colleagues quickly dismiss as “conceited and strange”. The young woman with signs of autism has absolutely no interest in social relationships and reacts silently to Endre's advances - with deer-eyed stares like those in Mária's recurring dream. In this dream, a deer and its delicate conspecific roam through a winter forest, searching for food under the snow cover, drinking from a stream, and you think you can read their great care, their mutual trust and their sense of responsibility in the eyes of the cloven-hoofed animals - a great love in an otherworldly peace. “Body and Soul” is a film as quiet as its two protagonists and as rich as their (buried) souls. Even in its climactic scenes, it refrains from any violent outburst of emotion, relying entirely on the facial and body language of the couple, who move in the field of tension of their longing until the “field strength” is great enough and the sparks are discharged - for example in Mária's very special “love music”, the fragile pop song “What He Wrote” by Laura Marling.