"Flesh and Soul" was translated into "The Mystery of Dream Deer" when it was released in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The film’s promotional slogan is even more explicit:

In dreams, souls meet.

Wake up from the dream and open your body.

11.24 Spiritual and fleshly intercourse.

It seems that what the audience will enjoy is not an art film that won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, but an erotic video full of lust.

Flesh and spirit, body and soul, two sides of a human being.

There is no perfect movie in the world that can analyze the essence of body and soul incisively and vividly.

Every director can express his or her own perception based on his or her own understanding.

A fan from Douban short review wrote:

2017 Beijing Film Festival post-screening exchange meeting. According to the director, she was walking on the road one spring day, breathing the spring air, and suddenly had a feeling: the passers-by hurriedly passing by might also feel the same way. So I completed the script in two weeks.

For this reason, if it were you and me, how would we understand and express it?

In the snow-covered forest, two elf-like deer are chasing, looking for food and drinking water in the forest.

The ethereal clarity in the deer’s eyes transforms into a person’s yearning for the soul.

The Bible says: Psalm 42:1 My soul longs for you, O God, like a deer longs for streams. The deer represents the thirst for spirituality.

And what does the deer in the movie "Flesh and Soul" represent?

In the slaughterhouse, cows were driven towards the door of death with eyes that seemed to see through their fate but unable to fight.

Without the poetic longing of the misty elk like a fairyland, the unusually realistic lens follows a living body towards the end of life.

The upside-down cow head, the torn cow body, and the blood on the ground.

The cold machine blades cut the cows apart without any emotion.

The cow is the flesh body and a reflection of reality.

The deer is the soul and the dream that you yearn for.

The male protagonist, who has a disabled hand and does not edit the text, runs a slaughterhouse. The alienation from his adult daughter, the melancholy at boring nights, the bloody and cold company, he never took the initiative to contact his family or enter the workshop, as if the people and things around him were just supporting the rest of his lifeless life.

His loneliness is a kind of loneliness after entering the world.

This kind of loneliness does not mean seeing through the world after joining the world, but feeling hurt by the world after joining the world and leaving only loneliness.

His old body represents the richness of life experience.

He uses impeccable words to deal with all kinds of people.

He has a restaurant where he often went to eat, but this kind of loneliness made him want to take the heroine to revisit the old restaurant many years later, but he didn't know that the restaurant had already changed its owner.

He was not loyal to his body. He tried to fall in love with one woman after another, but in the end he ended up with nothing.

In order to satisfy his physical needs, he will find a woman to spend a certain moment of time, but then urge the woman to leave quickly during the wise time.

So, he is not a man worthy of his soul.

It is such a character creation, the director still believes that he still has the pursuit of an innocent soul.

The heroine is as cold as a robot. She is young, socially anxious, mysophobic, and impersonal under work rules.

The only thing that these two people with such huge differences in age and appearance have in common is loneliness.

But this kind of loneliness is a manifestation of two sides of the same coin.

The loneliness of the heroine is a character flaw that seems to be born without a preface.

Use your hands to touch food unusually to sense temperatures other than your own.

Her super memory can tell her first menstrual period on a certain day of a certain year, previous vaccination dates for infectious diseases, and even all conversations she had with others. But he only imprisoned himself in a mental cage.

She doesn’t listen to music, but for the so-called feeling of finding love, she can listen to music stores until closing time.

No crumbs are allowed on the dining table, and even blood stains left on the table when dressing wounds after suicide must be wiped off.

Every night when she gets home, she puts dolls on the table to simulate daily conversations with others, trying to perfect the entire language.

Afraid of physical contact. In order to change, I tried to touch the fur of animals. I bought stuffed toys before I dared to touch my body.

She doesn’t understand the sexual pleasures between the sexes. Her peers kissing passionately in the park made her stop. She can also calmly watch explicit pornographic films on TV while eating snacks. Even at the end of the story, she has sex with a man. When the Lord was having sex, he didn't even feel a trace of pleasure or repulsion.

The setting of the movie story is such an anomaly.

Longing for love, but not understanding love.

In front of the window of the office upstairs, the male protagonist spied on the female protagonist.

She moved her feet that were illuminated by the sun into the darkness, just like her original intention, without seeing the sun.

The loss of an aphrodisiac led to psychological counselors conducting psychological tests on all employees in the factory.

It was this accident that made the two of them discover that they were having the same dream every night.

In the dream, he was a male deer and she was a female deer.

In her dream, she seemed to be able to muster the courage to touch.

In his dream, he seemed to have just found a target to pursue.

So in the real world of the two of them, they finally found an opportunity to communicate with the outside world.

This fantastic dream of living in different beds is a fable.

What will happen if we break through the shackles of reality and return to reality after meeting in dreams (souls)?

The two met to try out their dreams in the same bed (same room), but ended up unable to fall asleep.

This failure may be related to the reverie that the male protagonist will definitely have after a long experience in human affairs, or it may be related to the uneasiness of the female protagonist who is not familiar with love but is in a closed space with others for the first time.

But this failure brought different psychological changes to the two of them.

The male protagonist thought that the same dream was just that, after all, many women he had known before could not get together in the end.

The heroine thought it was because she had been locked in a self-cage for too long, so she needed to try to change.

However, the heroine's own character flaws caused her to simulate the conversation between the two at home in advance. In reality, due to an accident, the happy communication did not go as she had imagined, and she decided to commit suicide. life.

For the male protagonist, the pursuit of the soul in the dream is no match for the seeming rejection of the body in reality.

For the heroine, despite the huge changes she has made in reality, she still does not have the warmth of the deer's nose-to-nose kiss in the dream.

This is the gap between body and soul.

But the same dream still cannot untie the knot of reality.

The dreams are the same, but the souls are not connected.

Under the sunlight, the heroine looks like an elf.

It’s just that there always seems to be more darkness than time for light.

She took off her clothes and opened the CD playing love music.

Smash the glass and pierce the glass shards into your wrist.

While the male protagonist can find a person of the opposite sex to solve his needs, the female protagonist regards the seemingly shattering of the soul’s dream as the end of reality.

So, the loneliness of the two is not the same.

So, the two people have different desires for souls.

At this heartbreaking moment, the heroine's heart should be like returning to the train not long after they first met.

Under the night sky as beautiful as an oil painting, there are two hearts far apart.

The blood kept dripping, and the ground beside the bathtub was covered with bright red, as if the calf waiting to be slaughtered died of helplessness and sadness, no longer dreaming, and thus no longer had a soul.

The magical moment arrives, and the heroine’s phone rings.

While the male protagonist opposite was nagging, the female protagonist with her bloody wrist still buried her situation deeply in her heart. It wasn’t until she said “I love you and want to see you” that she quickly tried to stop the bleeding. Went to the hospital and rushed to the hero's house overnight.

Then there was the least passionate sex, as if it was just a task.

The union of flesh and spirit.

From different beds and the same dream,

to the same room without dreams,

to the same bed without dreams.

The next day, no one thought of last night’s dream.

Perhaps, there will never be any more dreams.

The soul ends in the body.

Is this what the director meant? I have no idea.

At least as I understand it, the simple integration of the body into one and the integration of the body and soul into one are two different concepts.

The former is too simple and can be achieved casually.

The latter is too ideal, how many people can have it?