Now & Then: Missed Connections

 A pair of films, 37 years apart, from Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi:

SILENT FRIEND (B) - This contemplation of the connection between humans and plants -- and between humans across generations -- is languid and effervescent. It's easy to lope alongside and to drink in, but you might miss a tangible aftertaste. 

We lock in first on Tony Wong (Tony Leung), a neuroscientist who studies the brain waves of babies and compares them with the pings and zaps he can coax out of plants, in particular a massive, ancient ginkgo biloba tree in the middle of a storied college campus in Germany. Flash back one hundred years to that same campus and a much younger tree, and we see a youthful Grete (Luna Wedler) soldiering through some sexist oral exams to secure her spot as the first female student. She will end up skewing toward photography, as a way of capturing her research samples.

 

In between these eras are a pair of characters attending the university during the student activism of the 1960s. There we find a young woman, Gundula (Marlene Burow), attaching electrodes to a beloved geranium that sits in her dorm window. She entrusts the plant to a fellow student, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), to water and to monitor the continuous printout that resembles a seismometer, its jagged arm recording something coming off the plant. Hannes learns to interact with the geranium, developing a form of communication that is quaint and magical. 

Writer-director Ildiko Enyedi smoothly bops around among the three eras, casually spending time with each of her main characters as they go about their quirky research, often wordlessly. She unfolds this over 147 minutes that never feel like they are dragging. She avoids silly attempts at magical realism, and instead leaves a lot to the imagination of her characters and of her viewers. Leung, in particular -- the veteran from such classics as "In the Mood for Love" -- takes a laid-back, wistful approach. It helps that he is glumly corsetted in a COVID-19 environment (which has interrupted his regular research), spending much of his time alone or zooming with a French colleague (an underused Lea Seydoux). 

Patience is required. This played to a well-attended screening at 4:30 on a Friday, and the audience was mostly rapt. My mind wandered a couple of times into a hallucinatory zone, while I let the simple story wash over me, and I'm sure Enyedi won't mind if your neurons wander off a bit while she entertains you. 

MY TWENTIETH CENTURY (1989) (B-minus) - Ildiko Enyedi made her name with a somberly entertaining dabbling in magical realism somewhere in the realm of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Guy Maddin, a fairy tale about twin sisters separated during childhood and living dramatically different lives at the turn of the 20th century.

 

Dorota Segda stars as both Dora and Lili (and as their mother in an early birth scene), with Dora (above) as the good-time floozy who likes to steal from her marks and Lili as an earnest revolutionary in pre-World War I Europe. Threaded through the narrative is Thomas Edison's invention of the light bulb and the onset of the modern world. 

The sisters, who communicate to the viewer through their thoughts that advance the narrative, will pass through the same spot right before midnight on New Year's Eve at the dawn of the year 1900, but they don't interact. In an echo of Kieslowski's "Blind Chance," the siblings are essentially two ships (or trains) passing in the night. One man will interact with both of them, separately, and of course confuse the two of them. 

This is a movie unafraid of of straying from a traditional narrative -- the stars in the sky communicate with characters (recalling "It's a Wonderful Life"), and the camera travels to far-flung places like Burma, where we hear the thoughts of apes in the wild. And the bombs wielded by revolutionaries are cartoon-like -- black balls with a wick sticking out of the top. (Maybe that is historically accurate.)

Segda is arresting in both roles, finding nuance in the two women and contrasting Dora's joie de vivre (which rings hollow at times) with the mousier Lili. Each has a distinct way of dealing with the oppressive male gaze of the era. A climactic scene in a house of mirrors (a little too on-point) pays homage to Orson Welles. Despite the derivative nature of the film, Segda can make this quite moving at times.