Tony Leung & Léa Seydoux Star Alongside Plants

It’s unclear if Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi was inspired by the seminal 1979 Stevie Wonder album, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, for her latest enigmatic feature, Silent Friend. But she not only could have used its title as an alternative to her own — she manages to capture the music’s trippy and soothing spirit, as well as its sense of experimentation, in a movie that gradually washes over you like a warm natural fragrance.

That doesn’t mean this two-and-a-half-hour arthouse triptych about man, nature, botany and brainwaves is easy to sit through, especially if you’re looking for a conventional story, or perhaps any story at all. But Enyedi is a master stylist who knows how to create a certain mood, mixing visual poetry with deadpan humor, and big ideas with quotidian foibles, in a film that explores our mysterious relationship with both the green world and one another.

Premiering in competition at Venice, whose 82^nd edition has been marked by tough, jarring dramas and films about the sorry state of the planet, Silent Friend conversely dishes out positive vibes and a different, more reassuring perspective about where we may be headed — just as long as we start listening to nature as much as to ourselves.

Set at the same German university over three time periods spanning two centuries, the plot, which is more like a sketchpad of scenes and ideas, follows a trio of characters each conducting botany experiments that test the communicative powers of nature.

The modern story, which takes place during the 2020 COVID crisis, follows Tony (the great Tony Leung Chui-wai of In the Mood for Love), a respected neuroscientist from Hong Kong who finds himself locked down on an empty campus after the pandemic hits. Unable to conduct his research, which tests the brainwaves of infants before they speak, he switches subjects to start measuring those same waves in an old gingko tree outside his laboratory.

That tree, which was planted back in 1832, becomes the connective tissue literally, biologically and possibly metaphysically, between Tony and two scientists who preceded him at the same institution. One is Grete (Luna Wedler), a brilliant student who becomes the first female to integrate the university’s stuffy science department at the end of the 19th century. The other is Hannes (Enzo Brumm), a dreamer of a pupil in the 1970s who takes more interest in his housemate, Gundula (Marlene Burow), than his classwork, helping her run experiments on a geranium that sits on her windowsill.

Enyedi shifts between the three storylines at will, sometimes spending several minutes in one only to cut to another for a few seconds and then over to the third. At first this can be a bit perplexing, especially if you’re searching for a common narrative thread or for the plots to somehow thicken. But at some point you just have to go with the flow and accept that in true tripped-out fashion, the movie will be much more about the journey than the destination.

And that’s okay if you’re susceptible to Enyedi’s particular brand of filmmaking, which she honed over features like My Twentieth Century and the 2017 Berlin Golden Bear winner On Body and Soul. (The less remembered about The Story of My Wife, the better.) Exquisitely shot (in this case by fellow Hungarian Gergely Pàlos, who switches between crisp HD, grainy 16mm color and pristine 35mm black-and-white) and layered with dense sound design, her movies somehow feel both aesthetically ephemeral and sharply crafted — a contradiction she manages to make smoothly coalesce, especially in this work.

Indeed, Silent Friend is very much about bringing together seemingly unrelated elements — human voices with muted plants, the advent of photography with a botany lab, Tony Leung zooming with Léa Seydoux during the lockdown — to have them speak to one another, perhaps finding a common voice. We may be a lonely species, as the film’s three solitary protagonists seem to suggest; the lines of communication are nonetheless open if we’re willing to listen more, especially to an environment that rarely talks back (except, perhaps, here).

These are heady ideas, and Silent Friend is certainly a brainy film. But it’s also pleasantly unpretentious and at times, laced with deadpan humor, such as in a scene in which Seydoux’s botanist cheerfully offers to “send over some sperm” so that Tony can impregnate the gingko tree. Like any blossoming garden, the atmosphere here is sexually charged, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes more directly. But the film posits that sex is just another way for species to communicate in our solitary world, no matter what century we’re in.

The director thrives on these kinds of connections, planting her themes like a tree whose roots spread deeper and wider as the movie progresses. If you’re open to this kind of expansive filmmaking, then Silent Friend will probably, er, grow on you, culminating in scenes that crescendo with swirling, scientific imagery backed by a resonant score from Gábor Keresztes and Kristóf Kelemen.

It also helps that actors like Leung Chiu-wai and the luminous Wedler are charming enough that you don’t mind watching them do mundane things, like wandering around a deserted college campus to avoid a nosy security guard (Sylvester Groth), or photographing plants in a studio from the late-1800s.

The latter gig is what Wedler’s character does to pay the rent after her host family kicks her out for supposedly being too promiscuous, which she isn’t. Of the three stories in Enyedi’s enigmatic film, Grette’s is by far the most dramatic, as witnessed in an early scene in which she confronts a jury of sexist science professors doing their best to prevent her from entering the university. Her snide answers to their belittling questions are smart and iconoclastic, setting the stage for the other characters in the movie who also think outside the box.

That’s perhaps the best way to characterize Silent Friend: a movie that thinks outside the box, proffering a world view that’s open to new, unusual connections at a time when many people seem to be shutting themselves down. It’s also surely the first film in history that mentions its various species of plants in the end credits alongside the human cast members. Among other things in Enyedi’s rich and strange new feature, the director slyly proves that there are more stars out there than the ones walking the red carpet, if you just dig deep enough.