When silence is golden: Tree change film reconnects us with the natural world
As an antidote to action and violence on screen, Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildiko Enyedi’s new film explores humanity’s deep-rooted, often unseen connection with the natural world.
After achieving success early in her career with My Twentieth Century (1989), Magic Hunter (1994) and Simon, the Magician (1999), Hungarian auteur Ildikó Enyedi struggled to finance her films.
It didn’t help that she was a woman in a male-dominated environment or that there was little money on offer in Hungary.
Never one to give up, in 2017, after an 18-year break from feature films, Enyedi enjoyed huge success with On Body and Soul, which won the Berlin Festival’s top award, the Golden Bear, and The Sydney Film Festival’s prize for best film.
She followed up in 2021 with The Story of My Wife, which screened in Cannes, while in Venice last year she premiered Silent Friend to great acclaim before it screened at the Brisbane International Film Festival.
In our interview at the Cairo International Film Festival, where she received a FIPRESCI lifetime achievement award, Enyedi, 70, says she gained encouragement to keep making features after directing episodes of the Hungarian version of HBO’s In Treatment (2012-2017).
‘a beguiling, wildly original ode to better living through botany’
“You can see that it was made from peanuts,” Enyedi admits, “but it was very special, and it was a very joyful experience. HBO let us work quite freely.”
Freedom of expression has always been important to the writer-director, who started out as a conceptual artist. Now, in a cinematic landscape where sequels and trends abound, there is nothing quite like Silent Friend, as Variety notes: “Director Ildikó Enyedi finds her poetic, peculiar voice again with Silent Friend, a beguiling, wildly original ode to better living through botany.”
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Enyedi explores human interactions with plants, and she notes that it was not her first film to have a plant as its focus.
“Magic Hunter centred on 600 years in the life of an oak tree, then in Simon, the Magician there is a potted plant which resolves a murder mystery,” she says. “Karl Baumgartner, a daring German producer who had worked with Aki Kaurismaki, suggested that I make a film about plants. So, it’s thanks to him that I sat down and wrote the first version of the Silent Friend script.”
Baumgartner died in 2014 and the film, a German-French co-production (where Hungary came in later), is dedicated to him.
“My interest in plants is not like a gardener, not like someone with green thumbs, because I’m a city girl and I’m actually not very good with plants,” Enyedi says.
“But in the ’70s, when I was a teenager, I read about the first plant communication experiments, and they were super interesting. I followed the research and there was a backlash around 15 to 20 years ago, but these researchers got a new boost, and now it’s a really an important branch of research.”
Silent Friend has three interweaving sections which all take place at a university in Marburg, Germany, with three protagonists in different time periods connecting with varying plant life and a towering ginkgo biloba tree —their silent friend.
“I was really trying to give a hint of the notion of time,” Enyedi notes. “I was also hinting at other sorts of realities than the human one, and I wanted to show how ephemeral this thing we call human reality really is, how quickly and radically it changes, even in 120 years.”
So we have Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai (In the Mood for Love, Infernal Affairs) as a neuroscientist isolated at the beginning of the COVID pandemic; Swiss actor Luna Wedler playing a botanist who in 1908 becomes Marburg University’s first female science student; and German actor Enzo Brumm who plays Hannes, a student at the university in 1972 who is changed by observing and interacting with a geranium.
“The human heroes of this film are not instinctive shaman-like people who bond with nature,” Enyedi explains. “They are separated, and they need these interfaces of science, these sensors, these experiments. So, they are experimenting in the way Goethe proposed it more than 200 years ago.”
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She wrote the film’s 2020 timeline specifically for Leung, a Hong Kong actor who can say a lot with few words.
“He’s a stranger,” Enyedi says. “He’s an outsider. He looks at this little German medieval town as something very exotic. So, I needed a presence equalling his very, very strong presence.
“That’s why I asked Lea Seydoux to play this scientist (Dr Alice Sauvage), a biologist of plant communication, who becomes a mentor for Tony as he is exploring a new field. He’s an accomplished and well-known scientist and is ready to become an amateur. They worked together really well.
“Lea was the protagonist of my previous film, The Story of My Wife, and we really bonded. Here we see her only on (computer) screens, as it’s during the lockdown, so I really needed her strong presence.”
Luna Wedler had also appeared in The Story of My Wife. The Swiss actor won the prize for best newcomer in Venice for her steely portrayal as Grete in Silent Friend.
“In the 1908 timeline it is very clear that there is a very solid system, a set of rules which excludes women and Grete is one of the first cracks in this system,” Enyedi says.
“She needs all her force to find her place and to survive in this world. She could have become a suffragette and confronted very directly the system she’s in, but she found something else. She just followed her genuine curiosity and wanted a sort of independence from a system.”
In the ’70s in the film, Enyedi notes that Gundula (played by Marlene Burow) is also a very dynamic girl.
“She has her own science project with a geranium where she invites this shy young boy, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), who was very much based on my husband – he was actually a student at this university in Marburg,” she says.
“I remember these times where a young woman had to prove herself. So, she had to be extra sure of herself and shouldn’t show much of her vulnerability. Since then, there’s been a radical change in women’s possibilities and positions, and let’s hope that won’t be overturned.”
Certainly the future looks bright for Enyedi.
“When I turned 70, I started to wonder how many more films I can make. I have so many plans. It’s a double-sided thing … I have a lot of films that I still want to do.”
Silent Friend is in cinemas now.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema. She is a voting member of the Lumiere Award
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