On Body and Soul

The film opens and closes on nature, specifically, the rich, frozen world in which a stag pursues a doe. We learn that setting, which seems to be our physical world, is the dream that the two central characters are independently having. At the end, as the humans have transcended their respective isolation the two deer disappear from the scene. Nature thaws when the lovers connect.

The body in the title is represented in the uncompromising harshness of the abattoir. So too the central figures’ limitations, Endre with his crippled left arm, Maria with her Asberger’s withdrawal from touch and connection. 

The soul is represented by the dream-world of the deer. Endre and Maria are found to be dreaming the same dream — the same deer, their tentative interchange, the same frigid setting. The soul is the insubstantial, dream-like reality to which the body aspires and fulfills itself in discovering. Rarely has the body-soul conundrum been so dramatically posited.

Despite the other-worldliness of the two characters sharing a dream, this is a kind of madcap romance, where two initially antagonistic characters stumble into love. 

But the romantic far outweighs the comic, given the fleshy gore of the slaughterhouse and the poignancy of both flawed, struggling lovers. Conventional romance, the coarser “reality,” is rather represented by Endre’s unappealing colleague, who chafes under suspicion of his wife’s infidelities, and the swaggering, studly new worker.   
     When Maria and Endre finally make love there is an intensity, fulfilment and triumph that is always missing in more graphic representations. Both lovers struggle to break through their respective shells and self denials to connect.