Corps et âme

Beautiful. Moving. Funny. Touching. Magical. Shocking. Wonderful. A film for grown-ups with hearts and minds. The direction - the shots, the camera-work, the framing - are a pleasure: one admires parts of the film as one does a painting. The acting is so natural as to forget one is not watching a real life scene. The script is elegant and sparse - there is so much left unsaid; it's the space between the words that count. The all encompassing vision makes one proud to be a human being.

First things first: DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILERS they spoil the story.

And what a story it is! Slow, vulnerable, awkward, beautiful, painful. You can smell the sweat and blood and life.

The movie may be too intimate and fallible for some prople, though all those uneasy details add to the story and the feeling. It peaks in chatarsis multiple times during the movie, still the ending is a bit too obvious for my taste (especially when in contrasts to the previous 90 minutes as the movie cleverly and slowly evolved and expanded) Still this is a masterpiece: multilayered, well acted, well shot. Bruising yet uplifting. What more one may ask from a movie.

Update: initially I rated this 9/10 due to some nitpicking on technical issues like pacing at the end. After a week of haunting images, memories and feelings in its wake, I say this movie is the real deal: so here it is 10/10 (like M. Lazhar.)

Who would have thought that scenes of two deer, slowly moving through a snowy forest, could be so meaningful? Apart from being beautiful nature shots, there is a special meaning to them in this film, when it turns out that the two protagonists both dream of being a deer. That's the magic of cinema: to give images a deeper emotional meaning than they seem to have at first sight.

I loved everything about this film. The slightly bizarre story to begin with: two people discover that they're having the same dream every night. The way they discover this is priceless in itself. I also loved the two characters: both are slightly handicapped, one physically and the other one emotionally. Actress Alexandra Borbély is great, playing a girl with autistic spectrum disorder. And above all I loved the way the director takes her time to let the story develop: slowly but very deliberately, taking care of every small meaningful detail.

This is a very tender movie. The viewer can't help but sympathize with these two lonely people, both trying so hard to understand each other. It's making a great case for human dignity, mutual understanding and tolerance.

Snowfall in a forest of firs, gentle wind, the soothing sound of flowing water and two deer nuzzling in the mist. Endre and Maria are fastidious loners and mere acquaintances, yet they share this recurring dream. Though Maria has extreme difficulty with physical contact, she strives to overcome this limitation with her vivid imagination and immense desire. The mutual and expanding dreams tug at the pair, body and soul, but so do their fears, obsessions and predilections for solitude.

I loved the sensual nature of the film and the two main characters who delight in little things such as the warmth of sunlight and the brushing of hair with a hand. Close-up photography, of faces, reflections in the water and more, adds another layer of sensuality to the film. Both Endre and Maria work in a slaughterhouse and while the story does not dwell for too long in the raw bloodshed of this, it is enough to make you vow to become a vegetarian. I appreciate the film's slant on the subject, which Endre gives voice to in telling a candidate for a job at the slaughterhouse, "if you don't feel sorry for the cows, you can't work here." The character chemistry seems a little off, as Endre appears much older and uglier than Maria, but maybe it is just me. Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Saw this at the Berlinale film festival 2017, where it was part of the official Competition. Possibly a spoiler but no secret anymore: It won the Golden Bear for best film. Unusual love story in an even more unusual setting, namely a slaughterhouse. The two main protagonists, the financial director and a newly appointed quality controller, are both not socially streetwise. Their personalities with their deviancies are very well portrayed, letting them stand out from cardboard characters that appear in some (other) love stories.

The movie opens in a forest where we see one male and one female deer, watching each other from a distance. At later moments, we see variations of the same scene. But before we think this is some form of running gag, we get the reason why it is important and why it is repeated with small variations. It comes to light as a side effect of a psychological screening of all personnel working in the slaughterhouse, that the two main protagonists have identical dreams at night with said two deer in a forest. Initially, they both consider it unbelievable. And the resident psychologist even assumes that she is the victim of a practical joke, and does not believe it either. Their disbelief ends when they compare notes, and observe the similarities as well as the progress in the dreams, in hindsight easy to be derived from our knowledge what to look for as the couple grows closer together in cautious steps.

All in all, the screenplay demonstrates very well how the two main protagonists get attracted to each other, and how the rest of the slaughterhouse staff behaves around them. They are not exactly outcasts but not an integral part of the social structure either, so gossip and unfriendly comments are to be expected. The slow progress in their courtship is juxtaposed with the two deer in their respective dreams who come closer together in tiny steps. It is all very unusual, but one never gets the feeling that it is too far-fetched.