Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi's On Body and Soul is a love story that unfolds in a dream with an unexpected sensuality, strange yet romantic.
The film begins with a beautiful scene of a snowy forest where a stag and a doe are wandering… and puff! It's all a dream. We are suddenly taken to the present where Endre, the financial director of a slaughterhouse, is introduced to a newbie quality analyst Maria. Maria has a serious communication problem and is abnormally silent, a person who keeps to herself. Both works in the slaughterhouse where workers are seen chopping off animals for meat - explicit scenes in the films show that the urbanites have no idea about the brutal reality of how their food comes from. The grim reality of butchery is so barbaric.
Endre tries to befriend Maria which ends up as a total disaster. They realize that they can never connect in the real world. A small incident in office changes the whole situation. A police investigation on a stolen container of bovine aphrodisiac makes a psychiatrist talk to each person in the office. She discovers that Endre and Maria are having exact dreams. They slowly become dream lovers; a strange connection that forms after seeing similar dreams - the stag and the doe wandering the snow-covered forest. Slowly, they fall in love.
Both realize that they are part of something deeper but they find it difficult to express their emotion in the real world. Maria tries her best to come out of her introvert behavior and trains herself to become more physical with things around her. Though Endre and Maria decide to stay together for a night, they are unable to sleep because of Maria's aversion to touch people. Their world of regular sex seems to be very different from the 'normal' world and their affair becomes weird but way too romantic.
With Maria developing her physical closeness to Endre, both decide to be together - the fusion of the body and the soul.
Enyedi puts forward lots of questions- whether it is possible to remain as strangers in real life while lovers in their dreams? Whether such an awkward relationship is possible? We become a whole only when the body and the soul meet.
On Body and Soul is a strange tale of identifying one's sexuality and romantic life through two extremely different characters.
