Body Odyssey had its North American première on 22nd September at Fantastic Fest 2024
Body Odyssey begins underwater, in eerily bioluminescent caves and canyons, until the camera pulls back and tilts up, past the branchules of some seaweed, to a translucent kayak floating above, with a person lying supine on it. That person is Mona (Jacqueline Fuchs), and while we will now stay with her mostly at the surface – in a film obsessed with the superficies of body image – those depths that were our starting point continue to gurgle and reverberate throughout.
Though grounded, Mona is a creature of the water. She is often seen in the shower, in a swimming pool, at or on the lake near her home, or swinging and swaying her body along to a performance art piece whose dancing participants are dressed as sea creatures. And while no mermaid herself, she is in a way hybrid, in constant transition. A professional body builder, she works endlessly at her appearance, working out, bulking up, slimming down, toning and honing – and as she prepares for a Miss Universe contest, under the overbearing guidance of her coach and mentor Kurt (Julian Sands, in one of his last performances), she goes through a highly disciplined routine where everything – food, sex – is subject to strict portion control designed to optimise her weight and contour. Meanwhile years of steroid abuse has taken its toll on both her body and mind.
This is a superficial, surreal, hyerfocused, hermetic world, all slick modernist interiors to match the perfection that Mona seeks, and full of people who seem only ever to talk about fitness regimes. Beyond all the skin and sinew on display, we never get much sense of Mona as a person, but we do know that she has an inner life, no matter how impenetrable, beyond what she displays to the world. After all, she consults a shimmering figure credited as ‘clairvoyant’ (Jun Ichikawa) who appears to be an updated version of the magic mirror from Snow White (another story about the beauty myth), and regularly listens to the (male) voice of her own body intoning poetry to her. These two voices foresee both ruin and regeneration for her. At the same time, her ordered world is sent into a spin when, in a Turkish bath, she has an intimate encounter with the much younger, twinkish Nic (Adam Misík) who is as confused about her as she is about him. Now thrown off balance, Mona will return to her natural element, the water, like Odysseus voyaging home.
This tragic romance unfolds as cinéma du look, in a beautifully stylised manner that both complements and queers Mona’s quest for the ideal body – a quest that sees her manipulated, controlled and exploited by men, even as she is increasingly forced to renounce her own innate femininity and to sacrifice the healthy functionality of her own physiology. Body Odyssey is a difficult film to pin down. Populated with characters who allow us no way in, given to hallucinatory excursions and weird abstractions, and leaving the viewer unsure whether its heroine is ultimately awake or dreaming, alive or dead, Grazia Tricarico’s feature debut is, along with Rose Glass’ similarly gyno- and gym-oriented Love Lies Bleeding (2024), driven by desire. With the gurgling, rumbling noises of Mona’s appetitive insides eventually indistinguishable from the rippling, bubbling sounds of the lake’s depths, there is a mysterious merger of hard body and yielding liquid, suggesting a limitless fluidity beneath Mona’s solid surface as she yearns for something rich and strange in the untold, unknowable depths.
strap: In Grazia Tricarico’s mannered debut feature, a committed, ageing body builder is pressed down by yearning for what she has lost
© Anton Bitel
