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Rating:
(The review may contain spoilers)
To tell a non-conventional love story, even at the risk of being incomprehensible for long stretches. Ildikó Enyedi's film asks for the viewer's trust, almost takes them on a journey, to explore two lives at opposing ends.
The android-like precision of Mária is merely the superficial expression of an inability to live, a virginity of feelings and emotions. The brisk and pragmatic ways of Endre hide a complete disenchantment with life, a dragging of one's existence without cultivating hope for fertile feelings towards others and oneself anymore.
Their meeting as colleagues at the slaughterhouse soon reveals a magical connection, a dreamlike bridge in the form of two wonderful deer. Then the narrative flows coldly for quite some time, keeping the two parallel tracks for a long while. And in these paths that cannot come closer lies all the incommunicability of love: whether due to a disenchantment from having lived too much, or an inability from never having truly lived.
From this perspective, the film says a lot. It expresses the inexhaustible embarrassments of feelings and their emergence, their rising from the heart and soul to somehow reach the mind, the lips, to find verbal expression. Mishaps can lurk around every corner, obstacles can emerge or sink at any moment. Because real life is quite different from that pristine dream, where the deer have no need for words to love, to share the thirst-quenching water of the stream.
Man cannot avoid complications, the excessive enthusiasms, and the darkest depressions in the face of a single, perhaps rash, phrase. Between tragedy and paradise, there's a minimum fork in the road; just one almost imperceptible shift caused by right or wrong words.
The strength of Enyedi's work lies also and especially in avoiding any amorous clichés, in delineating a scenario completely devoid of romance and sweetness, yet infinitely more romantic than those that highlight it. Because these are the feelings of those who, for opposite reasons, seem impervious to any stirring of the heart. The viewer flounders, almost disoriented, because the blooming of love doesn't correspond to particularly coherent (and standardized) behavior in the two protagonists. The soul travels fast while the body remains almost impassive, expressionless like that of an android. Mária and Endre have become automatons, for opposite causes. Their journey back to humanity will be troubled.
7+
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