Gentleness and bodybuilding are not generally supposed to go together very well. Yet, in the Hungarian film Gentle, they do – perfectly so. Eszter Csonka, a real-life female bodybuilder, plays Edina, who is training for the world championship with the support of her partner, Adam (György Turós), a former top athlete himself.

While Edina suffers through an extreme regimen of high-protein, no-carb foods, steroids, and exhausting daily workouts, supervised by Adam, they are both feeling the sting of poverty in their day-to-day life. Nevertheless, the world championship must be won at all costs.

The audience might expect Edina’s boyfriend/trainer to get violent as she slips into the dangerous territory of fulfilling other men’s fantasies for money; however, this never happens. The characters and the story remain gentle, through and through. Edina shows us another kind of universe. A universe where everything is all right, where all have their wishes come true.

When we learn that Edina’s favorite pastime is “the pig’s slaughter,” we begin to wonder. Is her angry and blood-thirsty side going to be finally revealed? Wrong. What she loves about slaughtering a pig is that she can hold it, calm it down with her formidable muscles. She can reduce the slaughtering to a tolerable event.

“To be honest,” said co-writer/director Anna Nemes in the Q&A session after the film’s Sundance premiere, “we didn’t try to make a lecture on the topic or send an educational message, anything like that. We were just trying to show something of [the sport’s] reality and somehow capture it.”

The filmmakers’ interest in female bodybuilding began with the idea that it is a “contemporary phenomenon”, as co-writer/director László Csuja mentioned. Both he and Nemes saw this story as a paradoxical sign of emancipation: “There is high pressure on the body of women. So, female bodybuilding is somehow [turned] against the patriarchal society, [though] they are using the same [masculine] images like muscles. That’s why it’s very complex. We wanted to understand why they do it and how it works.”

Nemes, whose documentary Beauty of the Beast about female bodybuilding is in its finishing stages, proceeded to explain that this sport is like any other: “It’s a lifestyle, doing something this dedicatedly. It’s about how to express yourself, and your body is your tool. It’s like art, how you show your inner strength.”

Adam looks upon Edina as an angel incarnate, the only being on earth who has the power to revive the glory of his own past – and she willingly morphs into that vision. She lets the eyes of her audience devour her with awe and admiration. But, instead of turning into a narcissistic idol, she lets the admiration bounce off and reflect back on her like a saintly halo. “You are gorgeous,” she is told, and she smiles a little, like Mona Lisa.

Edina is the woman who plays her – Eszter Csonka. The bodybuilder carries the story with her physicality and her personality. “She’s so special, so open,” said Nemes about Csonka. She admitted that the script changed once the charismatic bodybuilder was discovered and became both the subject of Nemes’ documentary and the heroine of the feature. 

By western standards, Csonka could hardly be called a beauty. She has a masculine appearance, her nose is hooked, her skin blemished, and her body, of course, is unnaturally oversized. Still, there is something irresistible, something ineffably luminous about her, a soothing tenderness, a peaceful slowness. She sets the tone for the look and atmosphere of the film.

Csuja explained how the camera expressed the inner state of Edina. While she is restricted in the bodybuilding chambers or in the hospital, the camera is restrained. But when she feels free to express herself, the camera becomes fluid. “Because, I think, the core of this movie [is] that love [sets] you free,” he added.