It’s a great gimmick. Taking something as beautiful as a tree, and setting the tree’s changes as a backdrop to it the changes going on around it, that’s some movie magic sh*t that tantalizes great directors. We’ve seen trees be a part of romance, school semesters, and life itself, good and bad. Silent Friend adds an even bigger scope, taking everything I just said, and throwing it into a time blender to see what will happen. I never go this in touch with the quad at my university…or did as many drugs as Ildiko Enyedi, I guess.
The tree in question is a gingko biloba tree at Marburg University in Germany. We experience the tree at 3 key points in its life cycle. One is in 1908, when Grete (Luna Wedler) is studying hard to become the first female student at the university. The 2nd is in 1972, when farm kid Hannes (Enzo Brumm) becomes enamored with housemate Gundula (Marlene Burow) and her geranium experiements. Third is in maybe March 2020, when new professor, neurologist Dr. Tony Wong (Tony Leung) finds all his studies postponed from Covid, stuck alone at Marburg, trying to figure out what to do with his time. The 4th is in the 1930s when a young artist named Ado….
Kidding, obviously. If anything, Silent Friend is the opposite of 1930s Germany. It’s a beautiful portrait of connection, and how deep it can really go. Time means nothing to a tree; the 4 seasons come and go so often it all blurs together. As such, so do these 3 tales. Enyedi keeps the pacing and cutting intentionally deliberate, as if to try and bring us into the state of mind of these characters, and maybe even the gingko biloba tree itself. When you try that hard to understand something, empathy just starts coming out naturally. In all walks of life: person to person, person to nature, zoom to zoom. Being that uninhibited and pure in intention has this way of slowly eroding any walls that exist, and if we’re lucky, we hit that delirious state showed in the beginning of the movie where the mind instead of hyper focusing goes wide open, joining our tree being outside of time in some beautiful haze.
As for how this feeling manifests in the stories, Ildiko Enyedi has some good ideas there too. Each time period these gingko interactions have strange and wide ripple effects. Grete’s new perspective scares the laser focused male students and distrusting host family, convinced she’s doing evil acts. Heart broken but still open, she finds refuge in a camera shop, where she takes the time to care about the old photographer’s (Martin Wuttke) profession, using it to her advantage to go on a science exhibition, and capture her pictures. Grete’s history inspires Dr. Wong, who confer’s with a plant expert (Lea Seydoux) and tries more modern experiments of his own, completely opening his mind to what more he can learn from his setting, scaring the more closed off gardener Anton (Sylvester Groth). The Dr.’s research also probably had him stumble across Gundula’s about her geranium, which gets a great assist from Hannes, initially involved cause he’s into Gundula but learns to love and appreciate the natural world he took for granted when he was a kid. Watching someone’s worldview in a movie shift and feel like its earned is rare and profound; Silent Friend not only does this for one character, but for many, across multiple time periods, deepening its beautiful impact.
Ildiko Enyedi’s lovely film is a great reset if you find yourself needing one. You’ll calm down, and maybe rethink a couple things in your life, hopefully leading to even more exciting connections to be made. In the words of one of the great family movies: keep your eyes closed, but your mind wide open. Man, that film still gets me to this day.