‘Teströl és lélékröl‘ (‘On Body and Soul‘ in the English distribution), the film that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017 and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, is one of the successful films of Hungarian cinema from the last decades. Ildikó Enyedi, the film director and the author of the script, directed for Hungarian television the local version of psychologists series ‘In Treatment’, the format created by the Israeli Hagai Levi and exported in numerous adaptations on almost all continents. A psychologist also plays an important role in ‘Teströl és lélékröl‘, as she triggers a plot in which dreams, an unusual love story and a social parable are combined. Cinema from Central and Eastern Europe does not hesitate to blur the classical delimitations between cinematic genres and add different perspectives – the proof is this film that draws its viewers into its world and haunts them long after the viewing is over.
Endre is the general manager of a cattle slaughterhouse, a fairly modern establishment with industrial processes and production lines that only make the killing of animals harder for the sensitive to watch. This is just the unsettling background for the small human dramas we watch on screen. Endre is about 50 years old, his left hand is paralyzed, he is shy and lonely. Equally lonely is Mária, a new employee in charge of quality control. She is about 30 years old, extremely meticulous, a beautiful woman, but who has an obvious problem in communicating with those around her. A bizarre incident (the theft of an aphrodisiac substance for cattle, used for ‘insemination’) brings the police and a psychologist woman to the factory to clarify the case. She asks employees to tell their dreams. This is when we, the viewers, understand that the images of snowy forests that appear from time to time in the film are actually the dreams of the heroes. Endre and Mária dream exactly the same dreams: a deer and a doe meet in a forest. He is the deer, she is the fawn. The psychologist is convinced that the two want to play a prank on her. The man and the woman try to understand what is happening. Their lonelinesses approach, then they touch. Can the dream become a reality?
I really liked the story and the approach, until close to the end. We don’t learn anything about Endre and Mária’s past, about the traumas that made them the way they are physically (Endre) or behavior-wise (Mária about whom we only know has undergone some psychiatric treatments since childhood). Their approaching is timid and gradual, their meeting occurring first in a dream, then as an exploration of a possible friendship, and then the budding of a relationship. Both avoid physical contact for a long time. As in many fantasy stories, when the resolution belongs to the plane of reality, there is a risk of being disappointed. The two actors who play the main roles are superb. Alexandra Borbély is beautiful, strange and vulnerable as Mária. Géza Morcsányi, who plays Endre, is not a professional actor, and the choice is excellent, as he gives naturalness and sincerity to the role of the single man, who gets a chance at love late in life, and is afraid to commit himself in order not to hurt his partner The ending, like I said, let me down a bit, but I can’t imagine a better one. A strange and delicate film that I do recommend.