Flesh and Spirit is a quirky, sometimes brutal romance movie. It is difficult to understand the mating and reproduction process of deer in the movie, and this is also a reflection of the emotional development between the two relatively strange characters of the hero and heroine. The film begins with a very poetic shot: there is a male deer and a doe in a snowy wasteland, and as the film narrates the stories of the hero and heroine, the director keeps cutting back to the narration of the two deer. In this film, the hero Endre is the financial director of a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Budapest. Although he works in the slaughterhouse, Endere cannot face the animals being slaughtered; the heroine Maria is the quality inspector of the slaughterhouse, and She is an obsessive-compulsive disorder patient, but she cannot communicate with others normally like ordinary people. Although there is a seemingly vulgar plot in the movie "two people dream of each other", the generation and development of the love story of "Flesh and Spirit" is very slow and strange, and the style is so strange that it is almost neurotic.
The slow narrative rhythm, the occasional bloody slaughter scene, the inarticulate hero and heroine, and the poetic shots of deer in the icy wasteland have all made this film a lot of controversy from critics since its debut in Berlin. Some critics even criticized that the best national distributors for this film would be vegan fundamentalists, because they bought the film to show them to a large audience, telling them about the cruelty of the slaughterhouse, everyone should go Vegetarian. The director deliberately used the documentary filming method to film the process of animals being slaughtered, but it is difficult to say whether this can make the audience suffer.
The story of two self-injured and flawed characters who love each other and develop feelings for each other in the cold world of ice and snow is actually a very ordinary story, but the director Inyetti, from the perspective of a psychiatrist in the film, uses poetic and bloody occasions. The story told by the camera lens has a wonderful chemistry. This is apparently an author's film directed by Inyetti, and it has been 28 years since her last well-known feature film, My Twentieth Century, was directed and written by her alone. "Flesh and Spirit" is obviously a very clear distance from any ordinary commercial film and even most independent films. The film's use of color is also unique, save for a stag and a doe in the snowy moors that keep appearing. The most common colors in the film are white and red, which correspond to the colors of muscles and blood respectively, which is also the director's corresponding to the film's title "Flesh and Spirit".
The film is close to the fusion of Terrence Malick and Michel Gondry in the overall film style, mixed with fantasy, neurosis and rambling film narrative. The director fully depicts the psychological world of the two strange and somewhat neurotic characters in the narrative, which is shown to the audience through a poetic lens. But such a film finally won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, which is indeed beyond everyone's expectations. Of course, the chairman of the jury of this year's film festival, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, is not a man of the rules himself.
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