Festival Review: Silent Friend (dir. Ildikó Enyedi)
Three different characters living in different timelines have a special connection with the same botanical garden. In 2020, developmental neuroscientist Tony (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is serving out COVID-19 lockdown; at the turn of the 20th century, Grete (Luna Wedler) becomes the first woman to get accepted into the school’s science program, and in the 1970s, introverted university student Hannes (Enzo Brumm) falls in love.
Do plants have feelings? Do they have a language? When we are in a park or a garden, and we observe a tree, does it observe us too? Are flowers intelligent? And where in the hierarchy among the corpus of human experience across time, through all of life’s transgressions, discoveries and loves, would a lonely ancient tree in a botanical garden sit?
These are the questions Ildikó Enyedi grapples with in Silent Friend, one of the most mature films of the year and a supremely powerful meditation on the significance of the natural, non-animal, world. From all of the films I’ve seen at the festival, it reminded me most of Train Dreams, because it has the same meditative calmness about it, a stoic hue of oneness and interconnection between people and nature is omniscient in just about every scene.
It’s not an actor’s showcase, though it’s very much an ensemble film; the three central actors do excellent work, with Tony Leung Chiu-wai as the soothing neuroscientist and Luna Wedler as the resilient student the true standouts. The really magical thing about this movie, though, is that it’s the two non-human characters which generate the most emotional resonance. An ancient ginkgo biloba tree which is at the epicentre of all three stories, and whose extracts people today eat for circulation, cognition, and brain health, also known as the themes of this film. A young geranium also has a lead role in the 1970s timeline, and is involved in the film's most deeply felt moments of joy and pain.
Very much like The Red Violin (1998), a film about how an instrument affected all the people that came across it, Silent Friend upends convention to make the humans feel like supporting characters. The people moments though, such as the ones between Grete and a kind, old photographer (Martin Wuttke) who takes her in as an apprentice, or between Tony and a hardened groundskeeper who starts to come out of his shell (Sylvester Groth), recall some of the best moments from that gorgeously human tapestry of a film, Magnolia (1999).
It’s a film that strips narrative convention down and challenges the audience to be patient with its pedantic pace. Abstract cuts of nature documentary-style images take some getting used to. But for those who stay with it, and put their trust in Enyedi, patience is rewarded with a mesmerizing story that earns a corner all of its own in cinema’s living room. Great movies have the power to shift your thinking, calibrate your senses and feelings into new frequencies. That’s what Silent Friend does; if you pay close enough attention, you’ll walk out of the theatre and never look at another plant or tree the same way again.