Buddy movie 'Silent Friend' is told from a tree's perspective

“I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me,” sang a lovesick Clint Eastwood in the notorious 1969 musical megabomb “Paint Your Wagon,” pining amid the pines for Jean Seberg in the only Hollywood Western throuple to include Lee Marvin. Yet what if those trees actually had been listening to Clint? That’s the premise of Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s woozy and beguiling new film "Silent Friend,” which stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai as a Hong Kong professor stranded alone at a German university during the COVID-19 lockdown. Our sad-eyed scientist becomes quite taken with a majestic gingko tree that towers over the school’s botanical garden. Lonely, stir crazy and more than 5,000 miles from home, he starts to really enjoy his time with the tree and suspects that the feeling might be mutual. What follows is sort of like a buddy movie, albeit one told from the tree’s point of view.

“Silent Friend” posits, quite logically, that all living things have their own languages and means of communication. The movie is about how it’s probably impossible for us to truly understand these strange other beings we share the planet with, and why it’s worth making an effort all the same. Trapped at an unfamiliar school with nothing but time, our professor starts Zooming with a Parisian plant scientist played by French national treasure Léa Seydoux. This stuck-at-home mom is desperate to get back to work, so she helps him out with a few experiments, testing energy levels and other pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that would probably teeter into self-parody, were the film not so achingly sincere and Seydoux and Leung Chiu-wai not two of the most effortlessly charming actors on the planet.

We can ascertain from some weirdly mesmerizing abstract interludes with pulsating roots and what have you, that the tree really is happy to see his new friend. And who wouldn’t be happy to see Tony Leung Chiu-wai? He’s one of the cinema’s great romantic yearners, blessed with eyes that have ached their way through a career of legendary collaborations with Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien and John Woo. Somewhat surprisingly, “Silent Friend” is the 63-year-old actor’s first European production. Enyedi wrote this role for him specifically, which would explain why the character’s name is also Tony. It was a gamble, as he seldom acts outside of Asia — though he did play a bad guy a few years ago in the dismal Marvel movie “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” for which I hope he was handsomely compensated. (The one good thing about that movie is that it gave us a Tony Leung Chiu-wai action figure, in case any kids want to play “Flowers of Shanghai” or “2046” at home.)

As I was trying to explain, the movie is from the POV of the tree, and let me tell you, that old gingko has seen some stuff. Drifting between 1908, 1972 and 2020, “Silent Friend” spins a trio of tales in which students and teachers at the university long to be heard. By the plants, by their friends, or anybody, really. As Strother Martin once said to both Paul Newman and Axl Rose, what we’ve got here is failure to communicate. The 1908 story is shot in black-and-white and bears witness to the university’s first female student (a luminous Luna Wedler) being browbeaten and shut down by sexist professors. She eventually discovers she’s got a knack for this newfangled thing called photography, and while it starts out feeling like the most wayward of the film’s three storylines, this one clicked for me when I realized it was about her breaking down barriers by learning a new language of expression.

In 1972, we meet a frustrated, socially maladroit male student (Enzo Brumm) nursing an unrequited crush on a classmate (Marlene Burow), even though he has a much better rapport with her houseplants than he does with her. While she’s off hiking with some hunk, he gets pretty tight with a geranium she’s studying and in one of the movie’s more credulity-straining scientific leaps, he even manages to teach the thing a few cool tricks. She goads him on to express his feelings for her, but our boy can’t seem to find the words. Some guys are just better with geraniums, I guess. The story runs a cozy parallel with our pal Tony’s fraught 2020 relationship with a gruff university caretaker, the only other person on campus during lockdown. They’re separated by a language barrier and a natural suspicion, misinterpreting one another’s intentions at every turn until they make more sincere, concerted efforts to understand each other.

Enyedi’s previous film, the 2017 Oscar nominee “On Body and Soul,” was a romance about two Hungarian slaughterhouse workers who fall in love after realizing they share the same dreams. Not sharing dreams as in similar aspirations, mind you, but at night they actually see the same things in their sleep. Yeah, it’s a lot. She’s a lot. And when I was a younger man, I would probably have scoffed at both of these movies and the New Age earnestness of her messaging. Yet in its endearing, literal tree-hugging fashion, “Silent Friend” is trying to say that all of the mysterious and complicated organisms around us, whether people or plants, are similarly aching to be understood. The least we can do is try to listen.

“Silent Friend” opens Friday, May 22, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.