Tony Leung & Léa Seydoux Star Alongside Plants

It is not clear if the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi was inspired by the Steminal album by Stevie Wonder from 1979, Travel through the secret life of plantsFor its last enigmatic function, Silent friend. But not only could she have used her title as an alternative to hers – she manages to capture the tripping and soothing spirit of music, as well as her sense of experimentation, in a film that is gradually washing you like a warm natural perfume.

This does not mean that this triptych of two-hour arthouses on man, nature, botany and brain waves is easy to pass, especially if you are looking for a conventional history, or perhaps a story. But Enyedi is a master stylist who knows how to create a certain mood, mixing visual poetry with impassive humor and great ideas with daily weaknesses, in a film that explores our mysterious relationship with the green world and each other.

First in competition in Venice, including 82^ND The edition was marked by difficult and discordant dramas and films on the sorry state of the planet, Silent friend Conversely, jet positive vibrations and a different and more reassuring perspective on the place where we can head – as long as we start listening to nature as much as for ourselves.

Located at the same German university over three periods covering two centuries, the plot, which looks more like a sketchpad of scenes and ideas, follows a trio of characters who each conduct botanical experiences that test the communication powers of nature.

Modern history, which takes place during the 2020 cocovated crisis, follows Tony (the great Tony Leung Chui-Wai de In the atmosphere for love), a respected neuroscientist from Hong Kong who finds himself locked up on an empty campus after the pandemic strikes. Unable to conduct his research, which tests the brain waves of infants before speaking, he changes the subject to start measuring these same waves in an old gingko outside of his laboratory.

This tree, which was planted in 1832, became the connective tissue literally, biologically and perhaps metaphysically, between Tony and two scientists who preceded it in the same institution. One is Grete (Luna Wedler), a brilliant student who becomes the first woman to integrate the Department of Suffering Sciences of the University at the end of the 19th century. The other is Hannes (Enzo Brumm), dreamy of a student in the 1970s who is more interested in his roommate, Gundula (Marlene Burow), than his class work, helping him to manage experiences on a geranium which is on his edge of edge.

Enyedi moves between the three scenarios at will, sometimes spending several minutes in one to cut to another for a few seconds, then to the third. At the beginning, it can be a little perplexed, especially if you are looking for a common narrative thread or for the traces to thicken in a way. But at some point, just follow the flow and accept that real treble mode, the film will be much more on the trip than the destination.

And it does not matter if you are sensitive to the particular brand of cinema of Enyededi, which she has perfected on features like My 20th century And the winner of Berlin Golden Bear 2017 On body and soul. (The less he remembers The story of my wifeThe best.) Exquisitely fired (in this case by his Hungarian compatriot Gergely Pàlos, who switches between a crunchy HD, a granular color of 16 mm and a virgin black and white 35 mm) and superimposed with a dense sound design, his films feel in a way at the same time popular aesthetic, in particular in this work.

Indeed, Silent friend Consists of bringing together apparently independent elements – human voices with mute plants, the advent of photography with a botany laboratory, Tony Leung zooming with Léa Seydoux during locking – to make them talk about each other, perhaps find a common voice. We can be a lonely species, like the three solitary protagonists of the film seem to suggest; The communication routes are nevertheless open if we are ready to listen more, especially in an environment that rarely comes back (except perhaps here).

These are exhilarating ideas, and Silent friend is certainly a brain film. But it is also pleasantly unpretentious and sometimes, maintained with impassive humor, as in a scene in which the botanist of Seydoux offers joyfully “send sperm” so that Tony can impregnate the Gingko tree. Like any flower garden, the atmosphere here is sexually loaded, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes more directly. But the film postulates that sex is just another way for species to communicate in our lonely world, whatever the century in which we are.

The director thrives on these kinds of connections, planting his themes as a tree whose roots are distributed more deeply as the film progresses. If you are open to this kind of vast cinema, then Silent friend Ra probably, uh, grow up on you, culminating in scenes that crescendo with swirling scientific images supported by a resonant score by Gábor Keresztes and Kristóf Kelemen.

This also helps that actors like Leung Chiu-Wai and the Luminous Wedler are charming enough so that it does not care to look at them doing banal things, like walking in a deserted university campus to avoid a fiery security guard (Sylvester Groth), or photographing plants in a studio at the end of the 1800s.

This last concert is what Wedler’s character is to pay the rent after his foster family expelled him to be so-called too promiscuity, which she is not. Of the three stories of the enigmatic film of Enyedi, Grette is by far the most dramatic, as evidenced by a first scene in which she confronts a jury of sexist science teachers doing their best to prevent her from entering university. His dark answers to their demeaning questions are intelligent and iconoclastic, preparing the field for the other characters in the film who also leave the beaten track.

It may be the best way to characterize Silent friend: A film that thinks off the beaten track, offering a world vision that is open to new unusual connections at a time when many people seem to close. It is also the first film in history that mentions its different plant species at the end of the generation alongside human actors. Among other things in the new rich and strange functionality of Enyededi, the director slyly proves that there are more stars than those that walk on the red carpet, if you dig quite deeply.