Dir: Ildiko ENYEDI | Cast: Tony Leung, Luna Wedler, Léa Seydoux | Drama Germany/Hungary/France –147’
Beginning his tenure at the university of Marburg, neuroscientist Tony Wong finds himself stranded, more or less alone, by the COVID epidemic. But he is self-sufficient and resourceful, unfazed by his isolation. His specialty is the study of consciousness: particularly how adult attention takes the form of a ‘spotlight’, focusing on one stimulus at a time, while infants are capable of attending to many things simultaneously. Partly inspired by the presence of a gigantic ginkgo tree in the university’s botanical garden, his interest shifts towards applying his theories of consciousness to plants.
Silent Friend is a film about our relationship with the vegetable world (the ‘friend[s]’ of the title), and the similarities and differences of plants to human beings. it specifically draws parallels between the capacities for consciousness and procreation that we share with plants, revealing them as beings imbued not only with sexuality, but also with the potential for communication – among themselves and even, potentially, with us.
As Wong develops his ideas, his story begins to intersect with two narratives set in previous eras of the university, both featuring young female botanists. The first follows Grete, who, in the late nineteenth century, was the university’s first female science student. She successfully endures a painful interview by a panel of sexist professors, which, while prurient and probing, serves to introduce the theme of analogies between plant and human sexuality.
The other story takes place in the pseudo-revolutionary dope-smoking early 1970s. The protagonist here is Hannes, a shy, sensitive country boy attracted to Gundula, a female botanist researching the capacity of plants to react to stimuli, whose free and easy attitude to relationships, much bolder than his, also contrasts with Grete’s restricted life.
The film cuts between the three narratives, with the nineteenth-century sequences shot in sepia and the 1970s ones coded in grainy colour, marking them out from the crisp high-definition look of Wong’s story. There’s no suggestion that he is aware of his predecessors, or that the events of their stories ever impinge on his. The links are thematic and geographic, with the tree serving as a lynchpin and unchanging presence bridging the centuries.
Grete strikes up a friendship with the more enlightened son of one of the professors, but is unjustly accused of lewd behaviour and thrown out of her lodgings. This proves fortuitous, however, leading to an apprenticeship with a kindly photographer which gives her valuable new skills.
The 1970s storyline, perhaps the weakest of the three, hinges on Hannes’ investment in Gundula’s seriousness about her research: but the fact that her subject is a common geranium standing by an ever-open window, which she leaves him to administer when she goes on holiday, lacks credibility. The characterisation of the antagonists, a bunch of beery student radicals, also feels forced and parodic.
Wong’s own experiments are threatened by one of the few university employees still on campus, an elderly handyman who, disturbed by the professor’s odd activities, feels drawn to sabotage them. Wong’s research points to plants possessing the kind of distributed awareness he has observed in infants, and it culminates in his tracking of his own and the ginkgo’s convergent consciousnesses while he’s under the effects of peyote.
Silent Friend’s emphasis isn’t on plot, and some of the acting feels a little stilted at times (particularly the online dialogues between and Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Léa Seydoux). Enyedi is more interested in ideas and the striking visuals they spark than in character or narrative. But this doesn’t detract from a refreshing, original film which – unusually – deals with scientific ideas without delving into the realm of science fiction. Immersion in its world of ideas is a pleasure and, having begun with time-lapse footage of a ginkgo seedling at the very beginning of its life, the film ends with an unforgettable shot of the campus’s immense, mature tree in its magnificent autumn colours. @Ian Long
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2025 | Completion | SCREENING AT TORONTO 2025