Silent Friend

For evidence of the latter, one need only recall one of the most famous chapters from Martin Buber’s I and Thou. “I contemplate a tree,” begins the oddly moving passage illustrating what trees can teach us about human relationships, which includes the observation that “everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.” By learning to observe and understand trees in a relational manner rather than merely objectify them, Buber posits, we can expand our relationships with our fellow humans as well.

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For proof of the former, just watch Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend. At its literal and figurative center is a centuries-old Ginkgo biloba that, for its species, is actually on the younger side: they can live for thousands of years. Serene yet imposing, its presence feels more than just physical as it remains a constant throughout the era-spanning narrative. Taking place in and around a German university across three timelines — 1908, 1972, and 2020 — the Hungarian writer/director’s latest meditation of human connection is another reminder to look closer at the world around us and see what it reveals.

The most intriguing of the three timelines takes place in the early days of COVID and follows a professor visiting from Hong Kong (In the Mood for Love’s Tony Leung Chiu-wai) as he conducts experiments on the possibility of botanical consciousness. “What if they observe us the same way we observe them?” he asks shortly after Silent Friend’s most quietly compelling scene, in which he turns off the lights and instructs a lecture hall full of students to pass around a ball. The ball itself emits a soft glow as he explains radically different forms of consciousness and what they tell us about brain development. Leung, a legendary thespian famed for his collaborations with such directors as Wong Kar-wai and John Woo, is at his understated best in a performance that calls on him to speak softly lest the audience forget to lean in and listen carefully.

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Back in the ‘70s, meanwhile, two students explore a connection of their own as they research plants’ sensory perception — “if they react to things or just tolerate what happens to them,” as one puts it — and, even further back, the first woman admitted to the university lands a part-time job as a photographer’s assistant that deepens her understanding of both botany and biology. Each period is shot differently: 1908 in black and white, 1972 in grainy 16mm, and 2020 in era-appropriate digital photography.

The Hungarian writer/director’s latest meditation of human connection is another reminder to look closer at the world around us and see what it reveals.

Enyedi is best known for On Body and Soul, in which a slaughterhouse CEO and a meat inspector realize they’ve been having the same recurring dream in which they’re both deer. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, laurels that put the Hungarian filmmaker on the cinematic map. Silent Friend should keep her there.

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If all this sounds a little woo-woo, that’s because it is. It’s also moving in just the way it needs to be, and never overplays its hand. The three narrative threads are mostly disparate rather than direct echoes of one another as they might be in a more obvious film, one less confident in its ability to let meaning accumulate on its own. The narrative threads are linked not only thematically but by the enduring presence of the ginkgo, a kind of captive audience to the goings-on of generations that bears witness but never judges. Silent Friend invites us to do likewise.