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. 

In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden)

IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden)       A               

Frankfurt, Germany  (124 mi)  July – August  1978  d:  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The film IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS is told through the encounters of a man during the last five days of his life and it tries, on the basis of these encounters, to figure out whether this man’s decision, that on the final day, the fifth, he will allow no further days to follow, that he will refuse, is somehow understandable, or perhaps even acceptable.

—Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978)

Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with 13 new moons, albeit not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with 13 new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe.

In an unfortunately short career, from 1969 until his drug-induced death in 1982, Fassbinder directed 40 feature-length films.  One similarity in all of Fassbinder’s films are characters, straight or gay, male or female, who are unable to connect with people in the world around them, whose frustration with their own lives provides the meaning to his films.  A raw, searing, emotional powerhouse, with Fassbinder as the writer, director, cameraman, art director, and editor (with Juliane Lorenz), an extremely provocative and unimaginably compelling response to the guilt the director felt from his partner Armin Meier’s suicide, probably on Fassbinder’s birthday May 31st 1978 in Fassbinder’s apartment while he was receiving accolades at the Cannes Film Festival for DESPAIR (1978), allegedly due to their impending split, the 2nd such suicide in Fassbinder’s personal life, making relationships appear hopelessly dangerous and impossible.  Shot just a month after the death, the subject of the film, which follows the last five days of transsexual Elvira, born Erwin, unwanted and raised by nuns, played powerfully and tragically by Volker Spengler, who rarely speaks above a poetic whisper, where Erwin falls in love with Anton Saetz (Gottfried John), a rich Jewish Holocaust survivor from Bergen-Belsen who now owns real estate in Frankfurt, a city portrayed as a soulless expression of the sadistic effects of capitalism.  Saetz watches a scene with his bodyguards from the Jerry Lewis movie YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG (1955) Jerry Lewis - You're Never Too Young - YouTube (4:18), featuring Jerry masquerading as a member of a female teenage marching band in what has to be one of Fassbinder’s most unforgettable uses of irony, and remarks to Erwin, offhandedly, “too bad you’re not a girl,” which was enough to cause Erwin to have his sex changed, the ultimate act of love, demasculation, and a willingness to die for his love, only to be rejected and laughed at by Saetz, later beaten by men on the street, causing Elvira to revisit the stations of her life.    

Often characters will speak long passages of dialogue while seemingly unconnected images are seen onscreen.  In the company of her friend, a sweet-natured whore, Zora (Ingrid Craven), Elvira sets out to tour the slaughterhouse where she as a he used to work as a butcher, the visuals are similar to Godard’s WEEKEND (1967), but Elvira’s underlying narrative describing her own story is excruciatingly painful, an assaultive, agonizing, yet ecstatic scene, using historical trauma to communicate a sense of the personal, perhaps Fassbinder’s reference to the slaughter of the Holocaust:  “It’s not against life at all.  It is life itself.  The way the blood streams, and death, that’s what gives an animal’s life meaning in the first place.  And the smell when they die and they know death is coming and that it’s beautiful and they wait for it...Come with me, I’ll show you.  It’ll smell, and we’ll see them die and hear their cries, cries for deliverance.”  While the meats are butchered, stripped, and flayed, the intensity of the images mixed with the near hysterical pitch of Volker Spengler’s voice leave a lasting impression that sticks with the viewer through every moment of the film.  Elvira can be heard telling her friend Zora about her life with her last lover, mimicking his distraught, intoxicating lines as an actor, words competing with barely audible images, how she made a “man” out of him quoting a famous final passage from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, which directly alludes to the relation of pain to expression, of containment and silence:  “And when our gaze lights on a monstrous deed, the soul stands still the while…And if as a man, I am silenced in my agony, a god taught me to speak of how I suffer.” 

Elvira identifies with humans falling silent in their pain and expresses anxiety over castration, the act of demasculation, a reference to the impossible sacrifice it would take to rid the German male identity of the Nazi, which leads to a dream of a cemetery in which are buried not the dead, but the brief times “a person was truly happy.”  Next she visits the convent of her youth, and speaks with the Sister (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother), who describes the intense longing Erwin felt as a young boy waiting for the next visits from his step-parents to be with such detail that Elvira responds by fainting, remembering the stark emptiness she once felt when she realized the visits would eventually end.  Challenging or punctuating our notion of history and forgetfulness, Fassbinder creates a peculiar party sequence underscored by a shrieking soundtrack of recorded screams with one man talking incessantly while another quietly pumps iron, or Elvira witnesses a black man hang himself in one of Anton Saetz’s empty rooms but not before he helps open her bottle of wine, while in another Zora watches television while Elvira is asleep, as a news broadcast details the horrors of Pinochet's regime in Chile, where Fassbinder places himself on the television right after the newsreel footage, literally implicating himself in Armin Meier’s tragic death.  The unforgettable tape recorded narration heard throughout the film (particularly during the final scene) was not scripted, but was recorded with Fassbinder asking questions of Volker Spengler answering in character, where by the end, Fassbinder’s voice was cut out, as Elvira in the end quietly decides to end her life.  The film utilizes harsh color, asymmetric sets, a dissonant sound track, and alternating narrative techniques to evoke the depths of Evira’s pain, a film of suffering, muteness, and repression, emanating grief like no other movie, stretching the boundaries of conventional storytelling, also starring Elisabeth Trissenaar and Eva Mattes, dedicated to Armin Meier - - easily Fassbinder’s most personal film.