Hong Kong icon Tony Leung has channeled brooding urban energy for the masterpieces of Wong Kar-Wai, balancing the debonair ennui of Marcello Mastroianni with the quiet watchfulness of Montgomery Clift.
In one of the few films he’s made outside Asia and in his first European production, Leung traveled to Germany to film Ildikó Enyedi‘s mystical, mind-bending “Silent Friend,” in a performance that brought him closer to the natural world. He plays a neuroscientist, Dr. Tony Wong, who in the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020 is studying the electromagnetic impulses of, of all things, a gingko tree in Marburg, Germany. He leads one of three stories in a triptych that also features Léa Seydoux as a botanist, Luna Welder as a German feminist scientist in 1908, and a couple of college students in 1972 experiencing first love — all in the tree’s midst.
IndieWire recently spoke to writer/director Ildikó Enyedi and Leung about their new film. Enyedi is the Oscar-nominated Hungarian filmmaker best known for “On Body and Soul,” but her filmography goes back to 1989 with Cannes Camera d’Or winner “My 20th Century.”
“After watching her movies ‘On Body and Soul’ and ‘The Story of My Wife,’ I said to myself, I have to work with this director,” Leung said. “I never planned in my 40 years of acting career [to make a movie outside Asia]. I just let things happen. If something comes up to me and I find it interesting, then I will do it. But mostly it depends on director. The director is the most important person, not the script.”
Enyedi added he’s “big about saying no,” rather than chasing roles himself. She said she decided to anchor Leung’s part in the film in 2020, during the start of lockdown, because that’s when “time becomes fluid … when human perception of the world and its relationship to nature shifted. It was a global human experiment. Everyone got the chance to stop and reconsider their priorities and our relationship with the human world. The ’70s was about redefining our way of living in the world, and the world connecting to other humans, and to animals and plants. The first plant experiments happened then. Then, the turn of the 20th century shows the first very serious cracks on the quite pretentious [idea] that the world is controllable, in what the encyclopedists believed in, that we could just list everything and put everything in a little case.”
Leung’s neuroscientist in the almost-present-day chapter (which is woven throughout the film’s entire fabric) is stranded at Marburg University at the height of the lockdown — and he ends up experimenting on whether or not trees can mate, his own perception of the world altered in the process. Same goes for the actor himself.
“I’m not a science person. For my preparation for this role, I needed to study a lot of science books, and a book about plants’ intelligence,” Leung said. “It really changed my perspective toward plants. I see them as sentient beings, same like me, same like human beings. I never had these kind of feelings before, and if you have this kind of respect toward plants, then what about other living beings? So you have a different perspective. It really changed my perspective to the world.”
The “In the Mood for Love” star said he read up on books about “early cognitive development, plants’ intelligence, and a book by James Bridle called ‘Ways of Being,’ and a book by Alan Watts, something philosophical.”
Enyedi also spoke about whether or not her long-running filmmaking career out of Hungary shifted when “On Body and Soul,” about an affair between slaughterhouse workers that only takes place when they sleep, received a Best International Feature Oscar nomination in 2018. It obviously raised her profile and exposed her to the often tedious art of awards campaigning.
A film festival is “more important” than an Oscar nomination “because that side of the campaign, which needs lots of visibility, money, support, etc., is not there,” said Enyedi, whose “Silent Friend” premiered last year in competition in Venice. “My 20th Century” winning in Cannes in 1989 was “a reassurance to be able to continue in an era where it was just before the Berlin Wall went down. I didn’t get a diploma; my diploma film was banned for political reasons, so that was really something. After that, to be in competition in Venice, then Locarno, then again in Cannes, and winning in Berlin with ‘On Body and Soul,’ these are somewhow for me more reassuring reflections of my work because money and influence are not playing a part in it.”
“Silent Friend” is now in select theaters from 1-2 Special.
