A Ginkgo Tree Threads the Narrative of “Silent Friend”

He is not the first person at Marburg to have taken on the role of plant whisperer. In all three stories in “Silent Friend,” curious, intelligent humans seek to unlock the secrets of the vegetable kingdom—and invariably learn something crucial about themselves. Hannes’s roommate, Gundula (Marlene Burow), uses a primitive nineteen-seventies version of Tony’s 2020 technology to study and decode the behavior of her potted geranium. She wants to ascribe thoughts, feelings, and even words to every microscopic rustle of its beautiful purple blooms. When Gundula leaves for a few weeks, Hannes tends the geranium in her absence, with a dedication that proves enrapturing for him, even transformative.

Grete, in need of work and lodging, apprentices herself to a kindly photographer, Fuchs (Martin Wuttke), who trains her to look discerningly at her subjects: leaves, flowers, produce, and, in time, parts of her own body. The words “female gaze” are never uttered, but Grete’s refinement of her craft and vision—and her ability to call the shots in her work—offer some relief from the stifling patriarchy that has hitherto defined her existence. These qualities also tie her to Enyedi herself, who looks as intently and open-mindedly as Grete does. The hallmarks of Enyedi’s cinema—expressed in her enchanting début feature, “My Twentieth Century” (1989), and also her dreamily eccentric Oscar-nominated romance “On Body and Soul” (2017)—are an unfeigned wonderment at the world and its possibilities, and a firm belief in the medium’s ability to transmute those possibilities into art. When Fuchs hands Grete her equipment, you suspect that Enyedi carries his words in her own body and soul: “This instrument here requires care, Miss Grete. In the case of a camera, ‘care’ means using it.”

Enyedi, working with the editor Károly Szalai, cuts insistently—and sometimes a bit arbitrarily—among her three tales, letting them grow and coil around each other like wild vines. For a viewer, though, there’s no danger of getting lost: in a perhaps overly studied but effective touch, the cinematographer Gergely Pálos gives each vine its own distinct coloration, or lack thereof. The early twentieth century unspools on black-and-white 35-mm. film, an easy denotation of antiquity. 1972 has the warm hues and grainy textures of 16-mm. stock, and its tentative romance—love blooms between Hannes and Gundula, ever so slowly—pulses with a vibrant, sun-drenched loveliness. As for the pandemic section, it was shot with a high-definition digital palette befitting a story of glassy alienation: Tony spends much of his free time peering out windows at nothing in particular, quietly bemoaning the world that was.

Pálos’s stylistic delineations aren’t just handy markers; they underscore the notion that every era is both held in check and advanced by its reigning technologies. Every era, too, brings its own social and political pressures, especially in the hothouse of academia. When it comes to nurturing scientific curiosity, a university setting can provide useful tools—but not always, the film concludes, the most fertile of soils. Tony’s unorthodox project meets resistance from the school staff, some of whom fear for his mental health, and elicits barely veiled hostility from an on-site employee, Anton (Sylvester Groth), who is his lone company during lockdown. Still, Tony is in an enviable position compared with Grete, who is roundly dismissed by all but one of her male mentors and peers. A professor, questioning her during an admission exam, uses the work of the pioneering Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus—specifically, his writings about the sexual reproduction of plants, in which he compares a flower’s petals to “the bridal bed”—in an attempt to sabotage and humiliate her.

For Hannes, the care and feeding of Gundula’s plants provides a sense of purpose, but also, paradoxically, a kind of liberation that he isn’t getting from his stoner friends and their rambunctious, unfocussed activism. Watering shrubberies and monitoring a geranium become his personal acts of protest, a revolt against the tyranny of what people think he should be doing with his time. To take plants seriously as living, breathing, conscious, and communicative beings, the movie suggests, requires a measure of time, an embrace of solitude, and a retreat from the hectic anxieties of the modern world. (Adjusting to the absorbing yet languorous rhythms of “Silent Friend,” I was reminded that certain art films call for, and reward, a similar patience.) At the same time, Enyedi isn’t advocating for a hermetic existence. Even as her three leads hew to their often lonely paths, they all build meaningful, life-sustaining human connections.