Silent Friend [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], which focuses on a century in the life of a Ginkgo tree, will certainly plant ideas in your mind. It’s a wonderfully sincere film, with not an ounce of cynicism detracting from its upbeat curiosity about the natural world, and what there’s still left to discover about it. But in trying to fuse its biological experiments with the activities of humans in conventional dramatic arcs, it comes undone, like an attempted conversation between two people with no language in common. It was the final film to premiere in this year’s Venice competition. 

While its three dovetailing narrative strands are more than enough to fill out its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, by the time Silent Friend has completed its exposition and slowly revealed itself, little of the mind-bending science it concerns itself with resonates. The rather quaint idea at the centre of the film is that the grand old tree growing in a botanical garden on the grounds of the University of Marburg acts as a silent witness to the human activity unfolding around it at three different historical moments: the years 1908, 1972 and 2020. The university was established in 1527 and the tree was planted in 1832, therefore the plant's 200th birthday is approaching – just a fifth of its thousand-year lifespan. For all the teeming activity of the flora-human relations in the foreground, the titular “silent friend” feels like a more aloof presence than director Ildikó Enyedi is able to summon, with her treatise on miscommunication between organisms only repeating that fact, rather than achieving the poignancy she is reaching for. 

The iconic Tony Leung Chiu-Wai stars in by far the most compelling segment, playing one Professor Wong (a name surely referencing his greatest collaborator, Wong Kar-Wai) whose research on neurology has afforded him a visiting professorship in Marburg. Most recently concerned with studying the brain activity of babies, his experiments yield the pop-scientific insight that, using more of their brain capacity than adults’ typical 10%, their extreme phenomenological awareness makes it so that they are, technically, “high all the time”. As the pandemic lockdown grinds his teaching to a halt, a TED talk by a botanist archly named Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux) awakens him to the correspondences between plant and human physical reactions. The hypothesis certainly isn’t about pseudo-scientific notions of “consciousness”; it’s that the subtle changes over time and environmental attunements of plants (with the Ginkgo tree being his grand experimental subject) resemble our own, just at smaller rates of reaction.

These explorations are mimicked in the other two strands, finding Marburg’s first female university student (Luna Wedler) in 1908 discovering the utility of early photography in measuring plant development, and at the height of post-May ’68 student radicalism, a wayward student (Enzo Brumm) taking over his crush’s (Marlene Burow) experiments on the subtle reactions of her geranium to various environmental conditions. Early audiences so far have been beguiled by this more left-brained subject matter, seldom seen even in auteur cinema, but for this reviewer, Enyedi’s storytelling builds up a lot of anticipation about what scientific discoveries will be unveiled, but for an ultimately vague and anticlimactic outcome. This conclusion seems to be a statement about how we will forever remain at arm’s length from other living things not sharing our consciousness, with the unintentional result of making the film airily untouchable, too. 

Silent Friend is a co-production between Germany, France, Hungary and China, staged by Pandora Film, Inforg-M&M Film, Galatée Films and Rediance. World sales are by Films Boutique.