Fantastic Fest ‘24 - The Body Odyssey Review

The human body is quite something, isn’t it? Simultaneously sturdy and sensitive, it becomes our home or our prison. It protects us just as well as it can fail us. In turn, we can nurture it, push it to limits unseen, or let it wither away. Our body is always with us, and even then, there are moments where we struggle to understand it.

Grazia Tricarico’s strange and distinctive feature film debut, Body Odyssey, examines the physical sanctum of bodybuilder Mona (Jacqueline Fuchs). Her figure is sharp, etched and sculpted in the cavernous gym she attends with her trainer and manager, Kurt (Julian Sands). Guided by meticulous regimes and health check-ups that involve steroid dosings and sex, Mona finds control in the way she shapes her body. Tricarico, along with co-writers Marco Morana and Giulio Rizzo, explore what happens when Mona’s body is pushed to the limits by herself, Kurt, society, and something else that resides deep in the picturesque lake she lives near.

The world Tricarico crafts with the help of her production and design teams is equally alluring and sterile. The gyms, hotels, spas, and homes Mona navigates through are brutal stone structures with shadowed interiors lit by burnt orange lights and the gray natural hues of the outside world. In these places, lithe people who look like they just walked off any of the world’s runways strut about — Kurt included, who may be cinema’s most fashionable gym trainer. Meanwhile, Mona and her weightlifting colleagues are treated with a sort of gladiatorial respect. The world around them stare in awe — as well as disgust. They are specimens, art pieces even — impressive in looks and practice, but viewed as something non-human.

Mona finds comfort and eventual conflict with the body that’s gotten her so far in this society. As she trains to become the next “Body Universe,” the cravings of the ideal self, as well as matters of the heart, begin to create complications. On paper, Body Odyssey is a tale of the dangers of striving for perfection in a world of constant judgment. Thankfully, Tricarico and her co-writers approach this template with a divine angle. Mona (and Fuchs to a larger extent) are constantly framed as a goddess by Corrado Serri’s camera. Always at the forefront of every scene, Fuchs’ frame is seemingly idolized by the director, with numerous slow pans up, down, and around the actor’s body. As a result, Mona’s body comes across as something to lust over as well as worship. The otherworldly grace extended toward Mona takes on a newer meaning when even her body begins to speak to her, reciting training practices and bodily functions with poetic grace.

What exactly is happening to Mona’s body as she pushes it to the limits isn’t fully explained. On one end, this lack of explanation feels like an easy way for the writers to add an air of mystery and obliqueness without ever grappling with the concept of a woman and her body literally communicating with one another. On the other hand, the lack of answers pushes the film further towards its divine subtext: is her body’s newfound communication real, a symptom of overusing steroids and unchecked training? Or is it something beyond human comprehension, such as the pulls and visions of what lies beneath Mona’s nearby lake? Tricarico balances these feelings throughout, though the addition of Mona gaining an unhealthy infatuation with a young man (Adam Misik), that she has an impulsive hookup with, comes across as a tantalizing complication that’s underexplored. Love throwing off the protagonist’s reasoning is a plot device that’s well-worn, and here there’s an interesting angle of Mona becoming the unwanted pursuer in the “relationship.” The issue is that the script flits in and out of this plot line, negating its build up before landing with a thud by the time it pops up in the film’s final act. Like Mona ends up doing, the film just casts this thread to the side before going back to the conflict brewing between our protagonist and her body.

As the film’s center, Fuchs, in her first feature starring role, stumbles a bit, her delivery almost always coming across as stilted. The cause appears to be Tricarico’s decision to have the Swiss actor speak in English, a language she shows a solid handle of even if the final result is a character that sounds perpetually bored. That said, the rest of the cast takes on the same inflection and tone as Fuchs, creating a similar vibe to a Yorgos Lanthiamos production where everyone talks about things in a robotic manner. In one of his final roles on screen, Julian Sands brings a welcome bit of regal silliness to the determined and boundary-pushing Kurt.

Despite an uneven performance, Fuchs manages to use her body as a means of getting some emotional insight into her character. There’s an air of confidence the actor brings to the role, which keeps audiences glued to her journey. Going beyond the film, it’s also just nice to see another heavily-muscled person (and character) — like Katy O’Brien’s role in Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding — get a story that views them as a complicated and flawed character rather than a sideshow.

Like Mona, Body Odyssey is an impressive-looking work packed with deeper narrative meat residing under all the muscle and bronze. It’s a visually lush and interesting work that brings to life an interesting world of weightlifters and talking bodies. At times, it can fall prey to pretentiousness — after all, does a movie about a weightlifter talking to her abs need to come across as deathly serious as it does here? But pretension usually underlines the amount of love and importance the director and larger crew find in their work. In the case of this film, that appreciation bleeds onto the audience, covering them in a unique and memorable film experience.

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