The Hungarian director Ildiko Enedi is known to the domestic audience for the film "My XX Century" with Oleg Yankovsky, which back in 1989 was awarded the Golden Camera of the Cannes Film Festival. Traditionally, this award is presented to the best directorial debuts. After him, Ildiko continued her creative career, but she did not earn festival awards. The creation of the film “On Body and Soul” (2017) Enedi was inspired by a poetic work by Agnesh Nemesh Nagy, in which the poetess explores the characteristics of passions seething inside each person.
High expert rating
The film "On Body and Soul" reviews is exclusively laudatory, the rating of the tape is exemplary high - IMDb: 7.80. Within the framework of the Berlin Film Festival, the modest and low-budget drama about love has received four honorary awards: the prize of the ecumenical jury and audience sympathy, the Golden Bear and the Grand Prix of the FIPRESCI Film Press Federation. Most likely, each of the above communities wanted to celebrate the premiere of such a brilliant directorial work, ruthlessly accurately conveying the state of numbness inherent in the inhabitants in modern society. That is how the critics of the film evaluate the background of the film “On Body and Soul”.
Features of the shooting process
The action takes place in the vicinity of Budapest, on one of the slaughterhouses. The protagonists are the middle-aged single man Endre (Geza Morchani), who holds the position of financial director, and recently started to work as a quality inspector, Maria (Alexandra Borbei). As testimonials from the film “On Body and Soul” testify, the slaughterhouse on which the shooting process took place is real and active. But the director did not want cattle to be killed for the sake of realizing her highly artistic goals. Therefore, all participants in the process had to infiltrate the production process and quietly observe the daily activities of the workers of the plant.
The main characters at the very beginning are connected only by professional relations and a common place of work. But once it turns out that both characters see the same dreams. The intangible connection is so large that it invariably leads to the formation of an emotionally-intimate closeness between the characters.
Paradoxical parable of love
Within the genre framework of the picture, the story unfolds without a hitch, everything happens quite simply - an ordinary meeting, phased rapprochement and distance, the climax, followed by an inevitable break, but a happy ending to the total emotional crisis of both heroes. According to reviewers in reviews of the film “On Body and Soul,” this story would not have been so remarkable if it were not for the filigree work of the director and the professionalism of cameraman Mate Herbai in demonstrating the attitude of key characters and in creating internal connections between them. Moreover, critics consider the most interesting among them pastime in the dreams of Endre and Maria, which closes the beginning and end of the rapprochement of the central characters.
Leading actors
The beautiful parable of Ildiko Enedi is unsophisticated and paradoxical enough to instantly captivate film experts and viewers, and made world-famous leading actors. The roles of key characters were played in "About Body and Soul" by actors Alexander Borbey and Geza Morchani.
65-year-old Morchani has an impressive theatrical experience, for several decades he tried to realize himself as a playwright in theaters of Budapest. Work in the full-length artistic picture of Enedi became for Geza a debut in the big movie.
Alexandra Borbei until 2017 starred in short films and television series. The expressive and energetic actress during the filming of “About Body and Soul” was not easy, because her heroine is unemotional, like a robot or a representative of extraterrestrial civilizations.