Review of Ildikó Enyedi’s “On Body and Soul” (2017)

Last night we watched Ildikó Enyedi’s “On Body and Soul” (2017) and I woke up thinking about it. That means I am required by intergalactic treaty to write a review, and so here it is.

This one might be hard for some to watch. It’s a love story, more or less, involving a lonely younger woman who feels attracted to a lonely older man at her workplace. The complications come in layers: First, he’s a longtime senior manager and she’s a nervous new hire. Second, he’s had enough failed relationships that he’s decided to give up on them entirely and she’s neurodivergent in ways that complicate how she speaks to others, how she hears what others say, and how she responds to touch. Third, they work in a slaughterhouse in Budapest that is fulled of flawed and gossipy coworkers. Fourth, through a complicated turn of events at work, they discover that they both dream the same dream each night.
With all that, this movie might well have been some sort of issue-based drama of several kinds, or it might have been a quirky and problematic romantic comedy. We find that picture turns out to be none of those things, and is instead a sensual meditation on loneliness, on longing, on our dreams of romance and connection, on forgiveness, on tenderness, on how we connect to life and living things.

What makes this meditation a bit hard to watch for some would include its setting: The film doesn’t flinch from the work being done at this abbatoir, and emphasizes that this is how many of us get our food. The film makes a point of including frank footage of living animals being made into formerly-living food.

The concept of sustenance and the rituals of dining are important here, and many scenes involves someone eating or deciding not to eat or not being able to find food. The social tension of not knowing which table to join in a caferia keeps occurring, and so do the intricate customs and frustrations of cooking for one’s self and dining out. In the dream sequences, the sharing of food is presented as a profound and intimate act of love but in the waking sequences, the sharing of food is presented as perfunctory, as unsatisfying, or even a few times as graft.
Other elements that might cause us to feel discomfort include the consequences of infidelity and of petty cruelties, the male gaze, graphic self-harm, suicidal ideation, and the conflicting desires to be left alone without being lonesome. For a movie full of long silences and hushed conversations, there’s actually a lot going on beneath the surface.

In the end, we find that we care deeply for these two star-crossed lovers, connected so curiously and so tenderly by their dreams but separated so hurtfully by their several circumstances. We find that we want them to be together, and eventually we feel ourselves pushing against the narrative flow of the film and insisting or even demanding that they be together.

We want this so much that we feel it in our bodies and in our souls in much the same way the characters must feel it. That’s the magic of the movies, and that’s certainly the magic of this movie.