A Tree Grows in Marburg in “Silent Friend”

The film, a beguilingly expansive triptych from the Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi, is in no hurry to answer. One possibility is Grete (Luna Wedler), an aspiring botanist who, in 1908, becomes the first woman admitted to Marburg University, in Germany—an honor granted, begrudgingly, by an all-male panel of professors. Then again, the protagonist might be Hannes (Enzo Brumm), a former farm boy studying at the same school in 1972. His is a more enlightened era, but Hannes, lonely and withdrawn, doesn’t share his classmates’ interest in campus sit-ins and free love. Enyedi is temperamentally drawn to misfits and outsiders, which brings us to our third and fourth potential protagonists: each one a handsome, commandingly elegant figure, native to East Asia, now transposed to European soil.

I am referring first to Tony Wong, a Hong Kong-based neuroscientist who arrives at Marburg as a visiting professor circa 2020; he’s played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the smoldering star of the art-house dramas “In the Mood for Love” (2001), “Happy Together” (1997), and “Lust, Caution” (2007). But I am also referring to a majestic ginkgo tree that was planted on the Marburg campus in 1832, and which is the only character old enough to figure in all three of the film’s narratives. The tree, which graces a botanical garden, bears patient witness to all manner of human clumsiness. It stands there, stoic and uncomplaining, when Tony, unaccustomed to the local delicacies, pukes all over its roots during a postprandial walk. Later (but actually earlier), the tree provides Grete with a moment’s shade on her cigarette break. In both instances, the characters don’t notice the harm they’re causing to this magnificent specimen, but Enyedi does. She visualizes a cross-section of the ginkgo roots, which shrivel slightly as vomit leaches into the soil. She zooms in on a leaf’s smoke-exposed surface and adds crackling sound effects as the individual stomata are singed into oblivion. This is the message that “Silent Friend,” in its passionately compassionate way, means to leave us with: consider your plants. The movie gives us a pod’s-eye view.

Giving a lecture in Marburg, Tony awes his students with his studies of the brain waves of babies, noting that the infant mind, when presented with something of interest, can achieve far greater levels of cognitive stimulation than its grownup counterpart—levels akin to those of a psychedelic high. Only after the pandemic strands him on an emptied campus does he consider other types of minds. During his forced hiatus, he stumbles on the work of a French botanist, Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), and is inspired by her theory that plants have much to communicate to us, if we could only slow our pace and train our eyes and ears to detect it. With Alice’s guidance, Tony treats the ginkgo tree as a test subject, wrapping cords around its mighty trunk, attaching sensors to its leaves, and studying the emerging data as assiduously as he does his babies’ brain waves.