The Hong Kong International Film Festival screening of
Silent Friend that I attended had a post-screening Q&A
with its Hungarian director and Hong Kong star
Silent Friend (Germany-Hungary-France, 2025)
- Ildikó Enyedi, director and co-scriptwriter (with Tina Kaiser and Corinne Le Hong)
- Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm
- Part of the HKIFF's Galas program
My paternal grandmother was a vegetarian while her husband was not. At a family dinner one day, after she tut-tutted over my grandfather enjoying eating meat, he asked her: "How do you know plants don't have feelings too? They are living things too, after all!"
For some reason, that conversation stuck with me all these years. And I got to thinking about it again while viewing Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi's mystical-leaning film in which various plants prominently feature and (even) get mentioned in the end credits alongside the cinematic offering's human cast and crew. This not least because I could imagine this alternative movie's director or at least one of the main human characters in this rather fanciful movie sharing my grandfather's views about flora!
Set on a Germany university's leafy campus, Silent Friend tells the story of a trio of individuals who share the same space at various points in time -- not with each other but a giant gingko tree that is lovingly lensed (and turns out to even have some "stunt doubles"!). Tony Leung Chiu-wai (in his first ever European film appearance) plays his namesake, a Hong Kong neuroscientist who finds himself locked down on a near empty campus in the lockdown days of the Covid pandemic. Unable to work with his usual research subjects (human babies), he decides to conduct his research on brainwaves on a gingko tree -- and, in the process, attracts the attention and suspicion of a stranger (played by Sylvester Groth) who literally as well as metaphorically doesn't speak his language.
Although Tony does talk (including via video calls) to other humans (including a fellow scientist essayed by Léa Seydoux) from time to time, he seems on the introverted side. This also is the case with Hannes (played by Enzo Brumm), a student at the same university in the segment of Silent Friend that is set in 1972. And while he, too, encounters the gingko tree that Tony conducts experiments on, the plant that Hannes actually spends more time with -- and conducts his own experiments on, with truly startling results! -- is a potted geranium that belongs to his housemate-crush.
If truth be told, the section of Silent Friend that was set in 2020 seemed over indulgent at times while Hannes came across as rather weedy and was the least compelling to me of the film's three main human characters. In contrast, I was consistently absorbed by the section of the movie that was set in 1908 and is centered on the first female student accepted into the university's biology department.
Grete (portrayed by Luna
Wedler, whose performance won the Marcello Mastrioanno award for Best
Young Actor or Actress at the 2025 Venice Film Festival) impresses in an early scene when she is questioned by a sexist old male professor intent on humiliating her. But it is after she takes on a job (in return for room and board) with a photographer and learns to use a camera that she truly blooms. (I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to have this section of Silent Friend be in black and white came out of the photographs she shoots looking more arresting in black and white than colour.)
I don't think it'll surprise when I state that the best, downright exhilarating scenes in Silent Friend involve the humans in the presence of plants. What may be a bit more unexpected though is my thinking that there actually is more than one silent friend in this movie; and that while they are indeed plants in the 2020 and 1972 sections, it seemed to me that in the 1908 section, Grete's silent friend may well have been her camera (which allows her to see and depict plants, and herself too, in new, creative ways)?!
My rating for this film: 6.
No comments:
Post a Comment