Creating high drama out of nature and scientific discovery is not just the province of normal sci-fi. In Silent Friend, written and directed by award-winning Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi, the excitement is right in the middle of the garden where a towering Ginkgo biloba tree stands clocking the centuries.
Its narrative arc is obviously a lengthy one compared to the human time frame, but this long, leisurely paced film beguiles the time while the tree’s ancient roots slurp the sap and the leaves renew themselves, connecting the characters and lighting up the audience’s brain waves and pleasure centers. As a film for all ages and tastes from sci-fi to gardening, it should have no trouble crashing the art house barrier.
Communication with plants is the narrative’s connecting thread, but the theme is really human beings’ burning desire to do so – what Enyedi has called the “clumsy attempts of humans to connect with them”. So we follow the three main characters – a neuroscientist, a farm boy who has made it to university and a young woman who in 1908 became the first woman admitted to study botanical science at the same university – as their adventure of the mind unfolds, sweeping the audience along with it.
Prof. Wong, played with appealing calm and conviction by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, arrives from Hong Kong as a visiting professor in a quiet German university. He is just in time for COVID-19 lockdown and soons finds himself living alone on campus with only a distrustful caretaker (Sylvester Groth) for company. Attracted to an enormous ginkgo tree, he makes the mental leap to trying to read its thoughts and feelings on his sophisticated neurological equipment. His only support is Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), a researcher he finds on Internet, who schools him in the loneliness of a single female tree in a garden.
In a turn-of-the-century story, a young student Grete (a delightfully bold Luna Wedler) is a pioneer for her sex on an all-male campus. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when a lecherous old prof who is examining her for admission tries to trip her up on Carl Linnaeus’s sexual classification system for plants, or when the bigoted materfamilias who is renting Grete a room tosses her out for taking a morning walk. Homelessness leads to her encounter with an old portrait photographer and learning a new profession, whose connection to latter-day filmmaking is obvious.
Finally, there is the light-hearted story of a geranium that brings two students together during the years of protest in 1972. Hannes (Enzo Brumm), who defines himself as a farm boy who detests plants, makes some major discoveries when his girlfriend leaves him in charge of her geranium, wired up for an experiment.
All these strands are expertly edited together by Károly Szalai in an accelerating rhythm, as the characters’ lives seem to spiral closer and closer together across time, held together in the observing memory of the ancient tree. The final scenes are truly an emotional climax that close the stories in a burst of unity.
Enyedi, whose first feature My 20th Century won the Camera d’Or in Cannes in 1989 and whose 2017 On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear in Berlin, shows she is a master of her craft in Silent Friend, using a wide variety of film techniques to create emotional and intellectual response. Cinematographer Gergely Pálos switches from color in the modern scenes to eye-soothing black-and-white in the historic ones, and from 35mm to 16mm to digital, finding a sensitive balance that holds interest throughout the film’s two and a half hour running time. Especially stunning is the digital time-lapse photography that fills the screen with a seed opening and sprouting, along with other micro-wonders possible from advances in photography.
Director, screenplay: Ildikó Enyedi
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm, Sylvester Groth, Martin Wuttke, Johannes Hegemann, Rainer Bock, Léa Seydoux
Producers: Reinhard Brundig, Monika Mécs, Nicolas Elghozi, Morgane Olivier, Meng Xie
Cinematography: Gergely Pálos
Editing: Károly Szalai
Production design: Imola Láng
Costume design: Peri De Braganca
Music: Gábor Keresztes, Kristóf Kelemen
Sound: Michael Schlömer
Production companies: Pandora Film, Inforg-M&M Film, Nicolas Elghozi, Rediance Films
World sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In German, English
145 minutes
