After delving into a contemplation on nature with its 'all animals are sentient creatures' message in her film On Body and Soul in 2017, Hungarian filmmaker, Ildikó Enyedi presents Silent Friend, loosely connecting three narratives dealing with our connection with trees across time, observed by a 200-year-old ancient ginkgo biloba tree.
Tony Leung, making his first appearance in a European production, plays Dr. Wong, a renowned Hong Kong neurologist, who gets marooned in a medieval looking university campus in Marburg, Germany, due to the Covid outbreak. He was conducting an experiment on how the human brain functions differently in babies from that of adults.
In a lecture with a bouncing light ball in a darkened room, he gives an example with spotlight consciousness (adult brains only concentrate on one thing at a time), and lantern-light consciousness (babies are open to surroundings more and their concentration differs as their attention shifts more freely like a floating ball).
Now, due to Covid, all the students and faculty are cleared out. Wong's research is on hold. His perky German-Chinese assistant is only communicable through Zoom sessions, and he is the only one left in the whole empty campus, visited only by a cranky German custodian who serves him daily meals while keeping distance in accordance with the pandemic restrictions.
The second story starts in black and white with Grete (Luna Wadler), a bright student attending the same Marburg University, studying botany. It's the turn of the century and she experiences blatant sexism from a sea of male students and faculty.
In a cringe-inducing selection process in front of an all old-male committee, Grete is interrogated mercilessly through the texts of Carl Linnaeus, whose classification of plants based on their sexual organs was groundbreaking at the time. As the societal prejudices and sexual insinuation against young learned women in the early 20th century bleed into her life, Grete loses her lodging and finds solace in an old photographer's studio as an assistant, where she explores her artistic freedom and sexuality.
The third narrative thread concerns introverted Hannes (Enzo Brumm), who has a love/hate relationship with nature, due to his rural upbringing, falling for fellow university student Gundula (Marlene Burow), who has a lab experiment set up in her dorm room. The setting is in the 1970s, which means the counterculture, drug use and free love. Gundula tries to record her geranium's reaction to humans, because she believes our silent friends -- plants, trees, fungi, and so forth -- want to communicate with us as much as we do with them.
While being stuck in isolation, Dr. Wong contacts a fellow scientist Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux) who specializes in communicating with plants, and decides to conduct an experiment on the ancient ginko tree right in front of his temporary residence at the university. But he has to deal with the German gatekeeper, who is suspicious of his activities and is actively trying to sabotage his experiments.
With all these intersecting stories and breathtakingly beautiful images -- by Gergely Pálos, About Endlessness, Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, shooting in digital for 2020 section, 16mm film for 1970 and 35mm film for 1908 -- Enyedi tells about our relationship with nature and, by extension, among ourselves. Dr. Sauvage tells Dr. Wong via zoom that she sees lonely souls when she enters a garden: Male ginko trees separated from their female counterparts for landscaping reasons.
Tony Leung is aging like a fine wine. He carries a film with hefty philosophical implications with ease and elegance. His soulful, searching eyes and his wrinkles add to the wisdom and intelligence of his character, draping over simmering underlying sexual tensions in the film. He also does a tai-chi session in the garden completely naked.
Throughout these interconnecting stories, Enyedi makes us contemplate the fact that a ginkgo tree can live up to a thousand years, observing us silently, as generations of us live and die in its time.
Silent Friend can be seen as narratively unsatisfying, not tying up its threads neatly enough. But it reminds us that fleeting human existence and brief, yet meaningful connections are what matters, in the eons of time.
Silent Friend opens May 8, only in movie theaters, in conjunction with the Tony Leung retrospective at Lincoln Center - The Grandmaster: Tony Leung, via 1-2 Special. Visit their official site for more information.
Dustin Chang is a freelance writer. His musing and opinions on everything cinema and beyond can be found at www.dustinchang.com