‘On Body and Soul’ | Géza Morcsányi
Enyedi’s contemporary Hungarian drama centers on Endre (Géza Morcsányi), an executive at a slaughterhouse who discovers he’s having the same recurring dream as Mária (Alexandra Borbély), a government quality inspector sent to his plant. Borbély had honed her skills on the stage before Enyedi cast her as the meat inspector who has issues interacting with anyone socially, but Morcsányi, whom Enyedi had known as part of the Budapest creative scene, had spent most of his life working for a local literary publication with no real acting experience whatsoever.
“I was just looking for somebody with a real silent charisma,” the writer-director says.
Her instincts were rewarded when “On Body and Soul” won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival. Early on, bringing Morcsányi onboard was a hard sell to her producers. “I must say that I needed one casting session with him, but only to convince him that he can do the role,” Enyedi says. “He was generous enough to jump into this film adventure, which I feel is not easy. Not just that it’s a new situation for him, but it is dangerous to be an amateur [in] such a big role. You really have to involve yourself emotionally because you don’t have the techniques to step out of the role.”
Much harder than working with a newcomer was filming the dream that Endre and Mária share. It involves a buck and a doe that live quietly in a birch tree forest near a small lake and search for food, a simple image that was “nerveracking” to pull off without visual effects.
“It was a tiny crew up on the hill, and in a normal shoot every minute counts and even 15 minutes is a lot to lose, but here that sort of approach wouldn’t have helped,” Enyedi recalls. “We became much more easygoing and relaxed but at the same time very alert. Somehow, we knew that [the shot we needed] would happen. It was a nice present for me somehow that that scene, which became the starting scene of the film, just happened [naturally] minutes before sunset and the snow started to fall. So we were lucky.”