My heart loves a tree!

In a moment of The Silent Friend, the neuroscientist brought to life by Tony Leung (the protagonist of Happy Together in his first role in European cinema) weighs figs in front of the TV. The professor has little to do because he is stranded at a German university in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Until a program with a French scientist catches his attention. The expert argues that plants communicate with us, we just need to find the right communication channel to decode what they are telling us. Spurred on by this idea, the protagonist dedicates his efforts to finding a device that will allow him to connect with the proud ginkgo that presides over the university's botanical garden.

The tree structures the three interwoven stories of Ildikó Enyedi's new film, which take place in different eras and are told in varied aesthetics. If the contemporary narrative is presented in a digital format suitable for autumn colors, the story set in the early 20th century narrates in black and white the discrimination suffered by a student in a still very male-dominated academy; a girl who eventually finds in photography the means to investigate and capture the most unknown dimension of plants. The third segment, which takes place in the seventies, is shot on 16 mm, a texture conducive to luminous and ethereal love stories. Like that of the boy who adores a classmate. She asks him if he can take care of her geranium while she is away. The young man ends up obsessed with recording the plant's reactions to different stimuli.

In the manner of the film's protagonists, the Hungarian director resorts to a medium, cinema, which hybridizes scientific exploration and artistic impulse, to redefine the links between human beings and the plant world. The trees, flowers, and plants are present in the film not as passive objects but as subjects that increasingly intertwine with the characters' lives and transform their relationship with the environment.