Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  On Body and Soul ( Teströl és lélekröl ) was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Its director, sixty-one year old Hungarian Ildikó Enyedi, had not had a film released in cinemas since 1999 - Simon Mágus or Simon the Magician , a French-Hungarian co-production starring Péter Andorai and Hubert Koundé, about a Hungarian magician asked to help solve a murder. Enyedi’s films deal with the fantastical – she made her feature debut in 1989 with the Cannes prize-winner, My Twentieth Century , about two identical twins separated at birth who meet for the first time on the Orient Express. Dreams feature a lot in her work, as they do here. For On Body and Soul deals with an unlikely couple, each desensitised in their way, who fall in love because they share the same dreams, of two deer, a stag and a doe, in a form of courtship ritual in a snowy forest by a small frozen lake. Maria (Alexandra Borbély) is the new meat inspector at a slaughterhouse. Sh...

  Pictured : Grete ( Luna Wedler ) and  Thomas ( Johannes Hegemann ) contemplate the mysteries of the great outdoors in the 1908 section of writer-director   Ildikó Enyedi 's exploration of the secret thoughts of plants, ' Silent Friend '. Still courtesy of Pandora Film . (c) Lenke Szil ágyi. If we could understand what plants are saying, what would we learn? This is the question posed by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s film, Silent Friend . The ‘friend’ of the title is a large gingko tree featured in two strands of a film that spans three time periods, 1908, 1972 and 2020. Enyedi examines the role played by women in understanding the secret language of plants. ‘The results are going to be vague,’ notes Dr Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), who supervises research carried out by Dr Tony Wong (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) in a mostly vacant facility in Marburg, Germany – his study takes place during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Enyedi doesn’t provide an answer, but perhaps the tree is...