A Teströl és a Lélekröl (On Body and Soul)

Two people who share the same dreams at night. A magical premise that put in paper sounds ridiculous and corny, but that is captured with such a serious approach, that turns it into a smart, funny and touching love story that made the Hungarian director Idilkó Enyedi, the fifth woman to have ever won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival (a better fare for women filmmaker than Cannes, that has only awarded it major prize to one woman).

Probably the most standing feature of this film are the characters: the dry manager of a slaughterhouse who has a paralyzed arm, and the new quality supervisor of the same place who is psychologically unable to establish social relations. Even if they are very different from each other, both of them seem like the least likely candidates to star on a romantic film. But Enyedi knows how to explore their most human side without getting close to corny territory, in fact, she puts them in hostile territory: the dead animals in the workplace, the menace of a possible sex offender among their coworkers, the cold industrial environments that they inhabit; it is through the exploration of their dreams and their inner desires that we get to know them, to understand them and to empathize with them.

Particularly, Alexandra Borbély offers an amazing performance as the socially misfit Maria. Her body and her face express the awkward inadequacy of a woman that is brilliant in logic thinking, but is just unable to understand social nuances and contexts. There's humanity in her laconism and when she starts to fall in love, she is able to express this new feeling in a totally coherent way for her character.

It has a few week points, mostly past the middle point, with the unnecessary elongation of their will they - won't they situation, and in contrast, the secondary storylines being cut either abruptly or in an unsatisfactory way, but Enyedi also knows how to finish in a strong and convincing way the main history. It is ethereal and poetic as much as it could be funny and charming. Formal in the aesthetic, but evocative in the feelings that it provokes. Be sure to learn Enyedi's name because she might be on the way of becoming a very relevant European director.