Silent Friend

Ildikó Enyedi has always been fascinated with the inter-connected nature of our society. In the Hungarian filmmaker’s Golden-Lion winning film On Body and Soul, two introverted individuals who find themselves sharing the same dream connect in the spiritual realm, while in The Story of My Wife, a man who is indifferent to the concept of an eternal romantic partnership, marries the first woman who walks into his life and discovers the invisible emotional connections they have with one another. Indeed, Silent Friend is an extension of these thematic explorations and posits the following hypothetical: what if trees could communicate with humans? By expanding her horizons beyond the scope of human connection, Enyedi discovers an untapped commonality in the natural world, and challenges humanity’s intrinsic desire to lead nature’s hierarchy with a cinematically bold hypothesis. 

If you have read anything about Silent Friend, it’s likely you will have stumbled across its main structural conceit. The film intercuts three narratives set in three different timelines: one in 1908 filmed on 35mm B&W, one in 1972 filmed on 16mm, and one in 2020 shot on digital. The fulcrum which the narratives interchangeably connect on is a centuries-old ginkgo tree in the middle of a German botanical garden, a passive participant of each era’s reconciliation of humanity’s place in nature. In 1908, the first female university student (Luna Wedler) discovers natural patterns in the tree’s physiology through photography. In 1972, an aloof university undergraduate (Enzo Brumm) grows closer to his friend’s geranium that he is tasked with nurturing while she goes on holiday. And in 2020, Dr. Wong, a Hong Kong neuroscientist based in Germany (Tony Leung), turns to plants as his main companions during COVID-19’s extensive quarantine.

In every timeline presented in the film, Enyedi poses an encounter with nature and humanity’s innate desire to want to interpret its signs as forms of intelligence. Wedler’s character uses the power of photography—then an excitingly modern form of technology—not to explore past portraits but to look at the intricacies of the tree’s leafy gifts. Dr. Wong, an expert in the field of infantile interpretation, develops a similar skill in interpreting the neurological waves of the ginkgo’s impulses in a way not too dissimilar to that of babies, both requiring a bridge of knowledge between the untranslated and the communicable. Brumm’s arc with the geranium, at first a tedious ritual he performs daily at the behest of his friend, blossoms into a gentle, life-affirming relationship borne from his fastidious nurturing of the plant. In her interwoven structure of the film, she opens our minds to human’s similarity with nature’s most reliable relic, flora. 

Several creative choices in Silent Friend are simply stunning to watch unfold, from the very opening sequence of a ginkgo seed germinating that envelops you into the world of this stunning plant, to the use of the three different filmic textures that distinguishes each timeline while also establishing tonal synchronicity with their similarity barring visual difference. The cinematographer, Gergely Pálos, is most notable for shooting Roy Andersson’s more recent oeuvre, and there’s a parallel between both filmmakers’ works in how Pálos is able to draw comic and dramatic energy from his frames in spite of their seeming lack of dynamism. The picaresque composition of shot coupled with terrifyingly orgasmic sound design (created by the same audio engineers as Sound of Metal) heightens the luscious imagery Silent Friend evokes with every frame, making this one of the most beautiful films of this decade so far. 

In many ways, I believe more than ever after watching Silent Friend that humans and trees are a lot more alike than they are dissimilar. Although trees are seemingly fixed in their initial germination point while humans have the ability to sprawl and migrate, both have a keen sense of wonder in their position to the natural world. Trees, rooted to the ground, have nowhere to grow but vertically, transcending the orders of magnitude humans are naturally capable of reaching. They are visually in opposition but complementary in their coalescence. Enyedi takes this partnership one step further, hypothesising a world in which plants and humans engage in a participatory experiment, as stated by Goethe, wherein scientist and subject are able to both mimic and influence one another. In our symbiosis in this biological world, this hidden connection uncovered by Enyedi’s film is the synthesis of pure genius. Words cannot fully describe this experience; you have to simply feel it. 

10/10