They are replicants! Maria the substitute meat inspector,
and Endre the chief executive in a slaughter house, dream
of the same electric deers! Or at least some sort of deer,
loitering in an idyllic forest. These deer sequences --
one of which opens the film -- are in stark contrast with
the brutally depicted mechanical killing of cattle, although
the film leaves it to the viewers to make their own inference.

Maria is fresh-from-college social misfit. She has perfect
memory recall but is super sensitive; she would replay her
casual encounters at work with lego blocks at night (to
get things right the second time?). Still seeing her
childhood psychologist for her Asperger syndrome, she
mechanically watches porn to get ready for dates, without
success. Endre is much older, has forgotten too much,
and wants to keep it that way. The two has little in
common except dreamscapes in this Golden Bear-winning
cute romantic fable from ldikó Enyedi. Enyedi won fame
with her sophisticated fantasy _My 20th Century_, but her
more recent _Tamas and Juli_ is also a simple romance with
magic realism flourishes. The bland _Simon the Magician_,
set in Paris, aims for the same effect but misses badly.
_On Body and Soul_ is a strong return to form, with droll,
dead-pan acting and beautiful cinematography that always
seem to be peering into the protagonists' souls through
a doorway, or a window with reflections superimposed on
the characters; the intricate compositions belie the
simplicity of this tale.

To the extent that each film is "a metaphor for all of
cinema, "_On Body and Soul_ seems to share the dreams
of _Blade Runner_ (Maria certainly appears to hail from
outer space, and the slaughterhouse violence eclipses
anything by Rutger Hauer). But it has uncanny
connections to so many small films set in dead end
towns of rural Europe, where the only employer is a
soul-deadening meat-packing plant. There is Laurent
Laffargue's _The Mad Kings_, an _Iliad_ transplanted
to a commune outside Bordeux, where Eric Cantona (the
ex-soccer star) and Sergi Lopez act like they have caught
the Mad Cow disease. In Inara Kolmane's _Mona_, another
abattoir in Latvia becomes another scene of sexual
obsession and horror (a monster actually emerges).
I'm sure slaughter houses in African and Asian cinema
serve as metaphors for man-made environmental disasters
and provide avenues for escape from chaos, for
redemption. To fight climate change experts believe
we need to get rid of cows and turn their grazing
grounds into solar farms. One day we may have movies
in solar farms of dead-end towns. I don't know what
metaphor that would be, but it would surely be progress.

Never one to pass up a gratuitous chance to criticize
the arthouse critics, perhaps over the last 20 years
the latter have become like Maria the autistic, rigid
meat inspector (minus her individuality)? Critics
should be the interpreters, cultivators, guardian of
cinematic dreams. They should reveal, give form to
the hidden, mysterious web linking disparate films
like a morning dew. But the "Film Comment"/"Village
Voice" axis of bad taste instead dismantled these
precious connections, whitewashed vital parts of
cinematic history, Bolshevik style, to make room for
undeserving false idols. The most obvious example is
Kieslowski, from whom sprung a generation of admiring
filmmakers and TV series creators (including those
who made "The OA," the great streaming series of
the 2010s). By forsaking the Polish master, how can
the critics interpret the cinema from this Kieslowski
generation? They couldn't. They turned into monsters,
the killer of dreams.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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