Thirty years ago or so, British arborist Thomas Pakenham had an unlikely bestseller with “Meetings With Remarkable Trees,” a lavish, photographically illustrated doorstop that, for a time, seemed to adorn at least every other coffee table in sight. The book, a valentine to the largest and most enduring plants on our planet, eschewed standard botanical theory, instead dividing the world’s trees into five more fanciful categories: natives, travelers, shrines, fantasies, survivors. Perhaps Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi had a copy. The sprawling, stately and indeed remarkable Gingko biloba that binds the multiple narratives of her marvelous new film “Silent Friend” meets all those descriptions at one point or another.
Strange, enrapturing, simultaneously vast and minute, Enyedi’s latest spends a lot of time considering how we perceive our surrounding flora — but just as much on how it perceives us, which is where it starts to get a bit special, and even a bit sexy. On paper, most descriptions of “Silent Friend” might sound so fey as to tilt into tweeness, but the film is as sturdy and earthily rooted as the green specimens it pores over: It simply looks at them more closely and curiously than most of us do in our daily lives, and centers three characters who likewise learn to adjust their gaze and their internal rhythm to the more patient pace of plant life. In its subtle, beseeching exploration of the connection between the human world and less understood dimensions, this Venice competition standout feels like a spiritual extension of Enyedi’s Oscar-nominated 2017 comeback feature “On Body and Soul” — happily raking away memories of her 2021 disappointment “The Story of My Wife.”
Any film making a star performer of a mammoth, centuries-old gingko — actually played, so to speak, by three such trees in the university botanical gardens of Marburg in central Germany — needs a human anchor of at least comparable grace and presence. As luck would have it, Enyedi has one in Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, here making his first foray into European arthouse terrain, and ideally cast as Tony Wong, an introverted Hong Kong neuroscientist on a visiting professorship in Marburg. Already a fish out of water, he’s even further disoriented when the first COVID lockdown strikes in 2020, leaving him alone and adrift on the otherwise evacuated campus, while his human-based neurological research is left in limbo.
Few actors can play ruminative solitude with Leung’s degree of restless, unspoken intensity: Always a compelling thinker on screen, he makes Wong mischievous in his melancholy, obsessively busy in his boredom. In his daily time-killing, he happens upon the videos of French scientist Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux, returning from “The Story of My Wife”), whose theories on the subject of plant communication intrigue him. The plant world, she says, is far more interactive with ours than we mostly choose to believe — we just never slow down enough to notice the dialogue. When better to do so than in a global lockdown? As the two strike up a screen-based friendship, Wong is drawn to converse with the ginkgo. Digital sensors get a rise out of its car-wide trunk; so does the tree sperm Sauvage mails him for the lone, mateless specimen.
In two other timelines, meanwhile, Marburg’s mighty ginkgo bears witness as humans find their inner plant-whisperer. In 1908, bright young Grete (Luna Wedler) is the first female student to be admitted to the university, following a policy change regarded with resentment by ornery academic elders. In a brilliant, sustained scene quite different in tone and tempo from the remainder of the film, she’s grilled at her entrance review by a panel of petty misogynists, roundly defeated by her calm and intellectual assurance. Studying botany, she impresses flirty junior professor Thomas (Johannes Hegemann), though it’s only with a part-time job as an assistant in a photography studio that she begins to see plants with new eyes — studying and capturing them in deconstructed, sensual terms akin to the later 20th-century art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Georgia O’Keeffe.
In the film’s sweetest, wittiest strand, set in the balmy summer of 1972, gawky, diffident student Hannes (Enzo Brumm, charming in his first notable film role) doesn’t much care for plants, but is besotted with worldlier hippie Gundula (Marlene Burow), whose clunky mechanical monitoring of the potted geranium on her bedroom window sill seems to anticipate Sauvage’s research by a few decades. Her findings show that the plant reacts to human presence, touch and mood, and Hannes is initially skeptical. But he soon finds, when left alone with the brilliant amethyst-coloured bloom, that he isn’t alone at all.
If all this sounds on the brink of madness, “Silent Friend” isn’t at great pains to prove otherwise. With an outlook disarmingly poised between the dreamy and the matter-of-fact, it presents a different way of seeing, and indeed feeling, the world around us, and merely invites its audience to follow along. Enyedi’s script likewise doesn’t strain for tidy practical or cosmic parallels between its three story strands, at least one of which is more developed and resolved than the others. But each has its own seductive, immersive ambience — thanks in large part to the tactile, varied work of cinematographer Gergely Pálos (best known for his recent collaborations with Roy Andersson), who switches between inky monochrome 35mm, woozily saturated 16mm and crisp digital images as period and mood dictate.
“Silent Friend” aims less for a narrative climax, finally, than for a symphonic build of sensory elements across all its chapters — as intricate sound design and a euphoric score swarm around the rushing, iridescent visuals of budding plant life and feverishly awakened computer monitoring alike. You could say Enyedi is sexing up the usually staid visual language of botany and biology here, except it feels she’s merely tapped into the secret, teeming, horny psyche of the plant world. After watching this loving, very funny and abundantly fertile film, hugging the nearest tree doesn’t seem like enough — it deserves your warmest embrace.