In Our Nature
By Dan Schindel

Silent Friend
Dir. IldikĂł Enyedi, Hungary/U.K., 1-2 Special

Cinema usually relegates botanical life to mise en scène. Exceptions are notable enough to stand out. There’s the eponymous, sinister tree in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma (1999), which might be destroying its forest—and in the end, potentially the whole world. There’s the Tree of Life in Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), tempting a conquistador in the past and traveling the stars in a bubble spaceship in the distant future. There’s the camphor in Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988), possessing the gargantuan proportions of a child’s outsized imagination—the characters even have the courtesy to thank it for watching out for them.

Such films throw into sharp relief how movies usually feature plants as background elements or aesthetic objects, rather than living things to be understood. Now comes Silent Friend, which treats its botanical subjects with far greater gravitas. This is familiar territory for writer/director IldikĂł Enyedi, who had a houseplant witness and solve a murder in Simon the Magician (1994). Here is a movie that includes the Latin names of every single featured flora in the credits, far dwarfing the human cast.

This is only Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s second non-Asian film after 2021’s Shang-Chi, but the true lead is a magnificent ginkgo in the University of Marburg’s Alter Botanischer Garten. Enyedi depicts the tree with reverence, composing the shots it shares with humans so that it occupies the frame with them as a character of equal importance. In a manner not unlike The Fountain, the film is divided into three time periods, with the ginkgo their sole shared character. In 1908, when young women dance in the tree’s grove to commune with nature, it seems to dance with them. In 1972, the tree cradles a university student in its branches. In 2020, there are shot/reverse shot exchanges of silent conversation between the tree and a visiting neurologist played by Leung. The director’s attention ensures that it never feels like a piece of set dressing.

Enyedi has a recurring fascination with lonely people connected by coincidence, magic-realist phenomena, or both. Think of the separated twin sisters who keep crossing paths in My Twentieth Century (1989), or the coworkers who become unlikely lovers after they realize they’re sharing dreams in On Body and Soul (2017). Interacting with the ginkgo bridges lonely people across decades in Silent Friend. In 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler) is isolated as the university’s first female student. In 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm) feels out of step with his peers due to his disinterest in the counterculture. In 2020, Tony (Leung) finds himself living on the empty campus during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Silent Friend is most engaging in how it uses its broad scope to accrue a Wunderkammer of vaguely related niche subjects. The film’s conviction that its plants are full characters is best realized through its investigation into how changing technology opens new ways for humans to understand them. Grete develops a fascination with extreme close-up botanical photography that’s inspired by the work of Karl Blossfeldt. A girl whom Hannes has a crush on has hooked a polygraph machine to her geranium to read its moods, which is based on the (highly questionable, consistently unreplicable) experiments of Cleve Backster. Tony, who came to Germany to further his research into infant cognition, finds himself drawn to the question of plant perception, hooking up brain-scanning devices to the ginkgo.

These glimpsed historical errata are more interesting to read about, or perhaps learn about in a well-researched video essay, than they are to watch play out through much of Enyedi’s film.(It doesn’t help that the movie freely blends legitimate open scientific questions and possibilities about plant intelligence with eye-rolling woo-woo, like the geranium sensing Hannes’s presence from a distance.) In too many ways, the script makes the mistake of attempting to induce empathy for plants by anthropomorphizing them. The pinging between time periods tries to capture the ginkgo’s perspective, portrayed as nonlinear within the context of a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades. But the film’s deliberate pace conveys the opposite effect. The idea that a long life is slow only makes sense from a human point of view. If the ginkgo is seeing these people over the course of its own life, shouldn’t they actually pass it by like flies? A true attempt to cinematically inhabit a lifeform with such a drastically different qualia from humanity might be too alienating for most audiences; think of how Deborah Stratman imagines the inner lives of minerals in Last Things (2023).

And yet I keep thinking about the ginkgo. Enyedi has at least rapturously captured a tree’s physicality, even if she can’t realize its interiority. The characters to whom the ginkgo is a silent friend are not nearly as vivid—and it barely factors into Grete’s and Hannes’s plotlines. The movie creates friction between its leads and their peers through conflicts that verge on the cartoonish. Academics in 1908 being over-the-top boors is believable enough, but the student activists in 1972 are broadly ridiculous, punishing Hannes for leaving a sit-in by… leaving the sit-in themselves to follow him home, where they fuck with the geranium, which is ’80s-movie-level bullying. By the 2020 section, a university groundskeeper is in a resentful petty feud with Tony that only gets more absurd when he discloses what spurred his anger.

It doesn’t help that the movie cuts between the three threads with little regard for meaningful thematic parallels, or sometimes just basic pacing. Hannes’s section feels less like it reaches a natural end than it does like the story stopped bothering to check in on him. The best example of the movie’s lack of conviction in its humans is its use of Léa Seydoux. She gets the first “with the participation of” acting credit I’ve seen, and “participating” aptly describes her here, present only via screens as she advises Tony on his experiments. Its depiction of a socially distanced friendship feels entirely removed from the strides taken in making technologically mediated communication more cinematic, and Seydoux’s affect is of gentle disinterest. Silent Friend’s trees and flowers are wonderful characters; its humans are lacking.