On Body and Soul (Teströl és lélekröl)

 

Director Ildikó Enyedi

Actress Alexandra Borbély

The director (center) with her primary cast

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ON BODY AND SOUL (Teströl és lélekröl)                        C+                                               Hungary  (116 mi)  2017  d: Ildikó Enyedi

A film that falls into the Yorgos Lanthimos The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) syndrome, overhyped and overpraised from the arthouse circuit, yet dreadfully disappointing when actually viewed, never living up to expectations, preposterous in parts, overly contrived and graphically cruel, intentionally making sure explicit scenes of raw and unedited violence are seen, including actual slaughterhouse scenes of sheer brutality, including blood-soaked and mechanized decapitation, where a crudely simplistic Hungarian romance or love story turns into a nefarious medical experiment gone wrong, yet somehow it wins the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, while also winning the FIPRESCI Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize, and becoming Hungary’s official nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category, actually making the cut into the final five.  Largely overshadowed by other headline-grabbing films, Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica) (2017), the ultimate winner, allowing a trans actress to play a trans character onscreen, the pretentiously overwrought exercise in audience manipulation in Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017), winner of the Palme D’or at Cannes, and Andrei Zvyagintzev’s mesmerizing  2018 Top Ten List #4 Loveless (Nelyubov) (2017), an indictment of corruption and an all-out assault on the state of tyranny in Russia.  The director’s first film in 18 years, eloquently shot by Máté Herbai, it devises its own logical constraints, remaining low-key and distant throughout, immersed in its own state of aloofness, creating a dreamlike atmosphere that has its own spectacular life under the surface, showing a male stag and a female doe linked together in complete natural harmony in a wintry forest covered with snow, where an expression of natural purity stands in stark contrast to the penned animals being butchered in the slaughterhouse and the mundane ennui we see taking place on the surface.  That’s at least an interesting set-up, because Hungary has such a rich tradition of folk tales, but it’s the setting that’s disturbing, a local slaughterhouse, where there’s a blasé indifference to the animals, even in the way its filmed, as there is meticulous detail shown in the gruesome aspects of the job.  The workers aren’t an enlightened group, lacking individuality, followers of systematic routine, poking fun at anyone who’s different, even showing outright contempt, revealing a cruel prejudice to their everyday existence, which may simply reflect ordinary working class views.  What stands out is the casual air of indifference, as they’re simply not bothered by what they do and never question how they think, as there’s an ingrained perception of narrow-minded conformity that defines who they are collectively as a society, a disturbing normality that might actually help explain how Hungarians so easily became Nazi sympathizers. 

As if in response to this character flaw, the story centers upon two damaged characters, neither one of whom falls into the category of typical movie leads, as they simply defy classification.  Endre (Géza Morcsányi, in real-life the director of the biggest literary publishing house in Hungary) is the older financial director of a Budapest slaughterhouse, exuding melancholy or sadness, partially disabled by a crippled arm, while Mária (Alexandra Borbély) is the new quality control inspector, young, blond, and attractive, yet painfully shy and socially inept, naïve and childishly innocent, averse to all physical contact, yet with a photographic memory, showing signs of autism, teased relentlessly by the workers (and laughed at by audiences, unfortunately), as she refuses to socialize with them.  Not only are they both introverts, they are wounded souls who may never heal from their obvious deficiencies, routinely seen alone at home, where they are each defined by their relentless loneliness.  Countering that impression is Sanyi (Ervin Nagy, Borbély’s real-life partner), an overly macho new hire who brags about feeling at ease with killing animals, showing no remorse whatsoever, which he thinks is a needed skill for the job, though Endre thinks that could actually present a problem.  His biggest friend and confident is the overly anxious head of Human Relations, Jenő (Zoltán Schneider), whose oversexed wife (Zsuzsa Járó) has seemingly slept with every man at the plant (including Endre), always giving excuses for coming home late, basically inversing the power dynamic in their marriage, as Jenő is forced to do the shopping and look after the kids.  One particular early scene stands out, with Endre in his office, becoming distracted, looking out the window where he sees Mária standing below avoiding the others, situated behind a pillar, avoiding the sunlight, receding into the shadows, where she just happens to look up and see Endre looking at her, causing her to retreat even further.  A scandalous incident occurs, requiring a police call, as a small quantity of mating powder has been stolen from the premises, where low level police corruption is the norm, as choice cuts of meat are immediately handed over to the investigating officer, bringing in a police psychiatrist Klára (Réka Tenki) to interview the entire staff, asking extremely personal questions, hoping to get to the bottom of it.  In a riff on sexual stereotypes, she turns out to be extremely sensuous, shapely and attractive, catching everyone off-guard with the candor of her questions, which are sexually obsessed.  Thinking they are playing a joke on her, she brings in both Mária and Endre after their initial interviews, as they are each having the exact same dream about two deer frolicking around a small lake in the woods, quickly discarding their testimony as blatantly falsified, yet the two of them are stunned to realize such an amazing coincidence.    

What follows is a shared secret that only grows in significance, as each continues to have identical dreams about each other in deer form, never really leading to copulation, just a sense of undisputed closeness.  It’s an awkward situation that plagues each of them, growing even more apparent in social settings that are repeated throughout the film, where Mária is always alone, never eating lunch with anyone, preferring to be by herself, yet suddenly the two are having lunch together, often seen through glass windows, revealing odd or refracted reflections, drawing eyes from everyone else, though he’s old enough to be her father.  Their initial interest is more surprise than anything else, as a morose sadness pervades an overwhelming emptiness in their lives, yet the exotic richness of their dreams gives them life, growing serious, taking an interest in the peculiarly developing inner life that connects them both, not really knowing what to do with it, feeling estranged from their own feelings.  In an amusing twist, Mária transfers actual conversations with Endre into role playing sessions at home, acted out with salt and pepper shakers or Lego dolls, assuming both roles, but exaggerating the male voice inflections, like creating her own cartoon universe.  Mária revisits her child therapist (Tamás Jordán), feeling comfortable speaking to him, not really interested in pursuing matters further with an adult psychiatrist, but certainly her curiosity is piqued, acting out in strange ways, blurting out things she would never ordinarily say.  Their lives are filled with heightened moments, expressing an intensity they’ve never really experienced before, remaining distant and apart, yet consumed by the other in a mythically developing subconscious relationship taking place entirely below the surface.  Very few films actually confront autism head-on, where patients have difficulty identifying and understanding what other people feel, yet they don’t dismiss what they fail to understand, they are simply stymied by it.  The animal dream sequences, mixed together with slaughterhouse images, comprise the first half, where the two worlds collide, creating obvious friction, with the dreams adding a rare delicacy to what we experience, but that’s less emphasized later in the film, as the two attempt to navigate something resembling an actual relationship, becoming more conventional, bridging the gulf of desperate loneliness, but Mária keeps hitting a wall, unnerved by what she can’t understand.  When her therapist suggests music as a way to “feel” outside her private reserve, the first selection she chooses is hard corps death metal music, yet she doesn’t even flinch, showing no emotion whatsoever, yet it’s a starkly humorous contrast.  When a record store clerk suggests something she prefers, more of a defiantly sad love song that veers into forbidden fruit territory, it leads her into a strange, new world, Laura Marling - What He Wrote / OST Testről és lélekről (Music video) YouTube (4:08), spiraling into a danger zone of horrors, where all appears lost, before miraculously being thrust out of the doldrums and into the light, as confoundingly weird as could possibly be imagined, where the convergence from mythical to reality is utterly preposterous.  This is a film where shock value passes for drama, showing little interest in building and sustaining emotional tension, becoming completely one-sided as Mária is clinically objectified, dissected, and examined like a specimen under a microscope, requiring a Kafkaesque metamorphosis.  Not for the faint of heart, or anyone who takes autism seriously, as this is more of a clinical fairy tale. 

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Hurricane Sandy photos of the floodwaters in the NY subway, October 29, 2012

STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS      B+                       

USA  (102 mi)  2013  d:  Sam Fleischner          Official site

While the title doesn’t lend itself to greatness, or even anything out of the ordinary, but this film is anything but ordinary.  Taking a cue from Morris Engel’s groundbreaking film Little Fugitive (1953), which uses a cinéma-vérité documentary style for a fictionalized tale about a 7-year old child who gets lost overnight at Coney Island, seen from the child’s perspective, Fleischner’s naturalistic style accentuates the worldly conditions surrounding a 13-year old Mexican boy Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez, a non-professional actor with Asperger syndrome) on the autism spectrum who gets lost in the city of New York.  What’s particularly interesting is we’re not just seeing the world as a child would see it, but as an autistic child, where the sensory conditions are clearly heightened.  Inspired by the many stories of kids on the autism spectrum who wandered off from school or their homes, the outcome is often tragic, yet they are an inevitable thread of the world around us, largely unseen where they may as well be perceived as invisible, especially a child of color who is all but ignored.  Ricky spends most of his time quietly alone, never uttering a word to anyone, drawing pictures of strange and mysterious creatures, even as he lives with his family near the beach of Far Rockaway, Queens, where his mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) is a house cleaner, his father Ricardo Sr. (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is away from the home on construction jobs, while his 15-year old sister Carla (Azul Zorrilla) shows little understanding for her brother’s problems, feeling overburdened, growing easily irritated and impatient with always having to deal with him, and is more concerned with her own teenage life.  When she decides to go shopping and “forgets” to pick him up from school one day to walk him home, she believes it’s no big deal, that he’s old enough to get home on his own, but when phone attempts fail, his mother freaks out, knowing he’s all alone out there with nobody to help him.  Unfortunately, when Carla doesn’t show up, Ricky curiously follows a man with what he perceives is a magical dragon symbol on the back of his jacket heading into the subway, leading him onto an extended odyssey continuously riding the A-train to Manhattan and back, becoming a treacherous journey of survival. 

Because he doesn’t know the name of his subway stop, Ricky remains stuck in a kind of Sisyphean purgatory that takes on a life of its own, endlessly repeating his journey for days on end, where the sounds and sights of this subterranean existence are all too familiar to those that ride the subway, often swarming with people seemingly smashed together on subway platforms, while the screeching noise can be overwhelming at times.  As he sits alone connected to ear plugs, we never know what, if anything, he’s listening to while impromptu jazz music echoes through the corridors of the subway station.  While a hip-hop dance routine is performed inside a subway car, the overall mood is one of utter indifference, as a train ride is transitory, a means of getting from one place to another, a temporary inconvenience in terms of a loss of time, where people routinely avoid eye contact or speaking to strangers.  Lost in thought, the film takes on an abstract mosaic of impressionist images, where seen out the window of the front car, upcoming lights are continually changing shape, becoming energy fields that tap into the subconscious, while above ground buildings and roads whiz by instantaneously.  As time goes on, Ricky’s disassociation only grows, becoming positively heartbreaking when we realize he has no means to eat or drink, and each time he attempts to use the subway rest rooms they are chain locked at night, leaving him in a perilous predicament where he’s forced to urinate on himself, one of the few times fellow passengers actually acknowledge his existence, as they further taunt and humiliate him.  While you’d think a train employee would notice him, as the smell alone ought to attract attention, but he is surprisingly never rescued by anyone and instead completely ignored.  He is able to find an unused, half-empty water bottle, and even some small change enough to purchase a bag of potato chips, but after more than a week his state of mind deteriorates and he grows delusional from hunger and thirst, where he begins hallucinating, seeing fellow passengers turn into monsters, where reality shifts into another dimension with sights and sounds routinely altered.  This mental dilemma forces him to fear almost everyone, often seen scurrying away from perceived signs of trouble.     

The only distraction from Ricky’s harrowing journey is a strange fascination with odd shapes and designs, where he can be seen staring at mysterious patterns on the subway walls.  While Ricky’s dilemma is a purely subjective experience, so is that of his family, as his mother searches endlessly for him in all the nearby locations, gaining help from a shoe store saleswoman, Carmen (Marsha Stephanie Blake), where Ricky likes to spend time in the store staring at the different color designs of the shoes.  She helps put up signs with Ricky’s picture on it in the neighborhood and encourages the family to make a police report, despite their undocumented status, but the police are little help, continually finding missing kids that bear no resemblance to Ricky.  By the time Ricardo Sr. shows up, Mariana already thinks the worst, that Ricky may never return home alive.  Their search through the neighborhood is another impressionistic montage of wordless images, while Mariana also reports that he’s missing to his school, where she receives a lecture about how underfunded the school is to help special needs children, suggesting there are schools with specially trained staff that would be a better fit, which is an infuriorating insult under normal circumstances, but emphasizes the indifference Ricky faces, where even his school has little interest in helping him, and now he’s lost and utterly on his own.  Adding to the growing dilemma are reports that Hurricane Sandy is fast approaching, with amazing footage of a ferocious ocean with gigantic waves crashing onto the beach, where an ominous announcement is made over a loudspeaker that no trains will be running after 7 pm due to the anticipated flooding of the subway tunnels.  Once more finding himself abandoned and alone, he sees the fleeting image of the man with the dragon symbol on his jacket, following him to the edge of the platform and into the darkness of the tunnel, even as the audience hears disturbing sounds of onrushing water.  The next day, naturalistic shots of the storm’s aftermath are devastating, like the remnants of a tornado, leaving a path of washed up destruction in its wake.  The actual storm appeared during the final days of shooting, where the dramatic footage adds an apocalyptic edge of doom to the finale, where so much was lost in the destruction, where Ricky’s world comes to resemble the shadowy eye of the storm, a murky existence where real and unreal merge, an oasis of perceived calmness surrounded by indescribable wreckage.