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A Graceful and Meditative if Opaque Ode to Communion with Nature

Silent Friend is a movie that is utterly in love with plant life. Though I will admit to finding some of the slowness with which these processes are enacted and meditated upon exhausting, I can’t deny the intrigue of seeing in such detail the growth, evolution, and life of the trees and plants studied by Ildikó Enyedi’s new movie. Perhaps we’ve all seen those sped-up films of seeds blossoming into plants, or photosynthesis on a microscopic level, but there is a conscious grace with how this movie portrays them, as though wishing to emphasize to its audience the astonishing truth that it is. Rather than something mundane, it is something miraculous.
We often tend to forget that plant life is indeed life, and Silent Friend certainly makes several points to remind us. Across three spaces in time in conversation with each other, the plants the movie hones in on, specifically a geranium being grown in the 1970s and a great Ginkgo biloba tree being studied in 2020, the plants are anthropomorphized by their greatest admirers, many of their natural processes organically linked to those in humans -especially in the root narrative. And it doesn’t feel like a particularly crazy thing in context.
Credit to Enyedi for that -translating a conceptual framework hard to buy into sincerely. Though she also picks some good avatars in whom to invest this relationship to plant life. Chief among them is Tony Leung as Doctor Tony Wong, a neurology professor who through chance finds himself isolating at his prestigious German university during the 2020 lockdown, and as a salve to his boredom (or perhaps drawn of some other force) begins applying his expertise to the tree on campus -conducting experiments to determine some kind of deeper cognizance. He is not the first, as we see a 1970s student predecessor Gundula (Marlene Burow), engaged in similar research with a geranium that she entrusts to her classmate Hannes (Enzo Brumm), initially an agnostic to her theories, while she goes on holiday.
More curious though is the seemingly only tangentially related story of Grete (Luna Wedler) in 1908, the first woman accepted to the botany academy, dealing with the associated stigma while also finding herself drawn to the scientific and artistic processes behind photography. The tree stands in her timeline too, though its influence appears minimal. Her work connects with Wong's and Hannes', but her portion of the story seems far less interested in it -and more interested in her as a character. It absolutely works for this portion of the film though, anchored by Wedler who may be the best part of the movie. From her stoic demeanour as she is interviewed by the university's board, enduring their bevy of sexist notions and assumptions, to the awkwardness of her class experience -full of leering eyes and a teacher perhaps too interested in her, to her unexpectedly falling in love with both the art and science of photography -which Enyedi treats with as much reverence as the plants and trees of the other timelines, accentuating the awe of the photographic process for the audience well through her eyes and emphasizing its beautiful aesthetic merit.
But it's relationship to the other two storylines is tenuous, at the very least dense and superficial. And as each story runs into one another very frequently in the edit -with scenes in one or the others lasting as little as thirty seconds- there is a disarray in theme hard to ignore within the constellation that Enyedi is trying to craft. Still, there is a unifying force in the trajectory of curiosity that drives each section -modest ambivalence that grows into a passion. It is especially the case for Wong -and if anyone can sustain the slow meticulousness of lonely science experiments, it is Tony Leung.
Acting in English for only the second time, Leung is a vital centrepiece of the film, his gravitas of age with that deep expressive power of his holding focus as he spends much of the movie silently observing and testing his subject -occasionally liaising virtually with an expert on this theory (played by Léa Seydoux in a warm and generous cameo), or unconsciously alienating the one other person left in the facility: its caretaker Anton (Sylvester Groth). Their relationship is amusingly prickly, with Anton's confusion and distrust of Wong's seemingly bizarre behaviour standing in a tad for the audience. He is a passively antagonizing force for a while, as he judges Wong attaching pulse emitters to the tree, then comparing his own body processes through various activities to those of the tree. An understanding however is reachable. But whether or not Anton represents us, our eyes are still Wong's, witness to each of his hypotheses and breakthroughs. The provocative nature of these does come across through abstract meditative visuals, illustrations of the research that condense the lofty scientific ideas into identifiable, poetic terms. Though Enyedi does linger in these at times with a stillness that while communicating a proper solemn mood is also disengaging.
Brumm isn't as compelling a presence as either of his grounding counterparts, but his is the most conventionally interesting corner of the film. The connection between man and nature is starkest in his arc of gradually being allured by the geranium and taken in with the experiment he is entrusted with. There is a more relatable curiosity in the way this plant responds to Hannes’ stimuli, and in his own responses to it in turn -such as his infectious excitement over its twitching at an audio cue. He's very introverted and unassuming otherwise, but fascination with this experiment -even more than with Gundula- brings out a spirit in him -the avatar Enyedi wants for her audience over Anton.
And it is a kind of spectrum that he and Wong exist in on their relationship to their silent friends -perhaps Grete is there too on a much subtler scale. It would represent an evolution of understanding the proposed symbiotic relationship between people and nature, growing things specifically. Enyedi communicates the emotional core of this premise well, though perhaps not the substantive side. There is some lushness and beauty in her filmmaking, especially in some of the juxtapositions of time and place (even as others are more awkward), and maybe that is enough for the film to achieve. Maybe the point isn’t to prove or affirm a theory, but to simply present it through a framework emphasizing the grandness and eternity of nature. That Gingko biloba stands for more than a century -we just pass through while it endures, yet we can be in tune with it nonetheless, respecting its majesty. There’s a sentimental thought in that.
At the end of the movie, a character just sits pensive with the tree, as silent as their friend and simply absorbing its natural gravitas. That is very much what the experience of Silent Friend is. And it is a monotonous feeling at times, it doesn’t wholly make sense from a point of reason. But if you are open, it is a serene thing -entrancing and evocative, mesmerizing and healthy. You can’t help taking stock of what remarkable creatures trees are on multiple planes. Yet there is a little something satisfying when stepping away too.

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