Ildikó Enyedi’s latest film turns a single tree into a philosophical companion
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
From award-winning Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi (“Simon the Magician”) comes a two-and-a-half-hour film about an almost 200-year-old ginkgo tree, sitting in a park alongside 16th-century Marburg University in Germany. The film explores the question of sentience among members of the vegetative world and whether we will ever be able to communicate with our green and woody woodland friends. I thought J.R.R. Tolkien had settled this for good when he created the character known as Treebeard for ”The Lord of the Rings” (yes, I know that Ents are not trees exactly).
A scientist from Hong Kong named Tony Wong (famed Tony Leung Chiu-wai) arrives in 2020 in the university town just in time to be feted by a group who treat him to a “local specialty” that he later pukes on and around the tree in the university’s adjacent arboretum. His vomit steams in the cold air of the Teutonic night. Well, hello, Mr., whoops, actually, it’s Ms. Tree. Tony promptly falls asleep on a park bench, triggering the ire of the park’s protective gardener Anton (Sylvester Groth), who becomes Tony’s sworn enemy at first. Whenever Tony is in the garden, Anton is behind a nearby bush.
Tony is there to study the tree and, to do so, must attach sensors to the tree’s bark and plant devices in the ground around it. Earlier, we had seen Tony performing an experiment upon a baby whose head was adorned with a cap-like array of transmitters. A screen shows what we assume is the baby’s thought waves. Tony shows the baby toys and makes sounds to see the baby’s reactions on the screen. In early scenes, Tony has a young, anxious translator (Yun Huang) in Marburg, whose Cantonese is admittedly not good. She disappointingly disappears from the film. Tony also consults with French-and English-speaking botanist Dr. Alice Sauvage (an also underused Lea Seydoux), using Zoom. Alice sends Tony ginkgo gymnosperm to fertilize his solitary female ginkgo with Anton’s help.
The village surrounding the university boasts Tudor-like architecture and is a winding maze of narrow streets and small shops. Suddenly, COVID erupts, and the university becomes a ghost town.
Then, we’re abruptly in the early 20th century, in 35 mm black-and-white (the present-day scenes are digital), watching a brilliant young woman named Grete (the talented Zurich-born Luna Wedler) being vigorously interrogated by a group of dyspeptic, old male academics. She is one of the first female students to try to get a place at the formerly all-male university, and she succeeds. She is drawn to the tree, which is large and majestic, but only half its size when Tony arrives. Grete takes part in a sort of pagan nature ceremony, which gets her thrown out of the local house where she boards.
But feminist icon Grete comes across a photography shop with a sign soliciting an assistant who can work in exchange for room and board. She meets the owner (Martin Wuttke), a lonely old man who teaches Grete how to use his cameras and other equipment, which she uses to photograph plants. Grete touts her newfound skills to try to win a place on a university expedition to the “upper Amazon.”
In a third narrative string, shot in 16 mm and set in 1972, a young self-described “farm boy” and student named Hannes (Enzo Brumm) develops a crush on a more sophisticated fellow student named Gundula (Marlene Burow), who is performing an experiment on her geranium. Hannes hangs out with his dim-witted friends, reads Rilke in the tree, and helps Gundula, even though he does not care to know “what a cloverleaf being eaten by a horse thinks.” He even improves upon her technique. But he fears he will lose her to another, more worldly young man named Peter (Sky Hofmann).
At the center of these interweaving lives and their rivers of time stands the tree, a magnificent, real-life Yggdrasil, a leafy giant providing shelter and food to humans, animals and insects alike, a mysterious monarch of the wood. Do such entities have souls? Enyedi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tina Kaiser and Corinne Le Hong, does not provide a definitive answer. But her cryptic speculative tale has a deep, ruminative impact. Will the fertilized, golden-leaved miracle produce “another one?”
‘Silent Friend’
Not rated
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm
Director: Ildiko Enyedi
Writers: Enyedi, Tina Kaiser, Corinne Le Hong
Running Time: 2 hours, 27 minutes
Where to Watch: Coolidge Corner Theater
Grade: A-
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