Who is the protagonist of “Silent Friend”? The film, a beguilingly expansive triptych from the Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi, is in no hurry to answer. One possibility is Grete (Luna Wedler), an aspiring botanist who, in 1908, becomes the first woman admitted to Marburg University, in Germany—an honor granted, begrudgingly, by an all-male panel of professors. Then again, the protagonist might be Hannes (Enzo Brumm), a former farm boy studying at the same school in 1972. His is a more enlightened era, but Hannes, lonely and withdrawn, doesn’t share his classmates’ interest in campus sit-ins and free love. Enyedi is temperamentally drawn to misfits and outsiders, which brings us to our third and fourth potential protagonists: each one a handsome, commandingly elegant figure, native to East Asia, now transposed to European soil.

I am referring first to Tony Wong, a Hong Kong-based neuroscientist who arrives at Marburg as a visiting professor circa 2020; he’s played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the smoldering star of the art-house dramas “In the Mood for Love” (2001), “Happy Together” (1997), and “Lust, Caution” (2007). But I am also referring to a majestic ginkgo tree that was planted on the Marburg campus in 1832, and which is the only character old enough to figure in all three of the film’s narratives. The tree, which graces a botanical garden, bears patient witness to all manner of human clumsiness. It stands there, stoic and uncomplaining, when Tony, unaccustomed to the local delicacies, pukes all over its roots during a postprandial walk. Later (but actually earlier), the tree provides Grete with a moment’s shade on her cigarette break. In both instances, the characters don’t notice the harm they’re causing to this magnificent specimen, but Enyedi does. She visualizes a cross-section of the ginkgo roots, which shrivel slightly as vomit leaches into the soil. She zooms in on a leaf’s smoke-exposed surface and adds crackling sound effects as the individual stomata are singed into oblivion. This is the message that “Silent Friend,” in its passionately compassionate way, means to leave us with: consider your plants. The movie gives us a pod’s-eye view.

Giving a lecture in Marburg, Tony awes his students with his studies of the brain waves of babies, noting that the infant mind, when presented with something of interest, can achieve far greater levels of cognitive stimulation than its grownup counterpart—levels akin to those of a psychedelic high. Only after the pandemic strands him on an emptied campus does he consider other types of minds. During his forced hiatus, he stumbles on the work of a French botanist, Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), and is inspired by her theory that plants have much to communicate to us, if we could only slow our pace and train our eyes and ears to detect it. With Alice’s guidance, Tony treats the ginkgo tree as a test subject, wrapping cords around its mighty trunk, attaching sensors to its leaves, and studying the emerging data as assiduously as he does his babies’ brain waves.

He is not the first person at Marburg to have taken on the role of plant whisperer. In all three stories in “Silent Friend,” curious, intelligent humans seek to unlock the secrets of the vegetable kingdom—and invariably learn something crucial about themselves. Hannes’s roommate, Gundula (Marlene Burow), uses a primitive nineteen-seventies version of Tony’s 2020 technology to study and decode the behavior of her potted geranium. She wants to ascribe thoughts, feelings, and even words to every microscopic rustle of its beautiful purple blooms. When Gundula leaves for a few weeks, Hannes tends the geranium in her absence, with a dedication that proves enrapturing for him, even transformative.

Grete, in need of work and lodging, apprentices herself to a kindly photographer, Fuchs (Martin Wuttke), who trains her to look discerningly at her subjects: leaves, flowers, produce, and, in time, parts of her own body. The words “female gaze” are never uttered, but Grete’s refinement of her craft and vision—and her ability to call the shots in her work—offer some relief from the stifling patriarchy that has hitherto defined her existence. These qualities also tie her to Enyedi herself, who looks as intently and open-mindedly as Grete does. The hallmarks of Enyedi’s cinema—expressed in her enchanting début feature, “My Twentieth Century” (1989), and also her dreamily eccentric Oscar-nominated romance “On Body and Soul” (2017)—are an unfeigned wonderment at the world and its possibilities, and a firm belief in the medium’s ability to transmute those possibilities into art. When Fuchs hands Grete her equipment, you suspect that Enyedi carries his words in her own body and soul: “This instrument here requires care, Miss Grete. In the case of a camera, ‘care’ means using it.”

Enyedi, working with the editor Károly Szalai, cuts insistently—and sometimes a bit arbitrarily—among her three tales, letting them grow and coil around each other like wild vines. For a viewer, though, there’s no danger of getting lost: in a perhaps overly studied but effective touch, the cinematographer Gergely Pálos gives each vine its own distinct coloration, or lack thereof. The early twentieth century unspools on black-and-white 35-mm. film, an easy denotation of antiquity. 1972 has the warm hues and grainy textures of 16-mm. stock, and its tentative romance—love blooms between Hannes and Gundula, ever so slowly—pulses with a vibrant, sun-drenched loveliness. As for the pandemic section, it was shot with a high-definition digital palette befitting a story of glassy alienation: Tony spends much of his free time peering out windows at nothing in particular, quietly bemoaning the world that was.

Pálos’s stylistic delineations aren’t just handy markers; they underscore the notion that every era is both held in check and advanced by its reigning technologies. Every era, too, brings its own social and political pressures, especially in the hothouse of academia. When it comes to nurturing scientific curiosity, a university setting can provide useful tools—but not always, the film concludes, the most fertile of soils. Tony’s unorthodox project meets resistance from the school staff, some of whom fear for his mental health, and elicits barely veiled hostility from an on-site employee, Anton (Sylvester Groth), who is his lone company during lockdown. Still, Tony is in an enviable position compared with Grete, who is roundly dismissed by all but one of her male mentors and peers. A professor, questioning her during an admission exam, uses the work of the pioneering Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus—specifically, his writings about the sexual reproduction of plants, in which he compares a flower’s petals to “the bridal bed”—in an attempt to sabotage and humiliate her.

For Hannes, the care and feeding of Gundula’s plants provides a sense of purpose, but also, paradoxically, a kind of liberation that he isn’t getting from his stoner friends and their rambunctious, unfocussed activism. Watering shrubberies and monitoring a geranium become his personal acts of protest, a revolt against the tyranny of what people think he should be doing with his time. To take plants seriously as living, breathing, conscious, and communicative beings, the movie suggests, requires a measure of time, an embrace of solitude, and a retreat from the hectic anxieties of the modern world. (Adjusting to the absorbing yet languorous rhythms of “Silent Friend,” I was reminded that certain art films call for, and reward, a similar patience.) At the same time, Enyedi isn’t advocating for a hermetic existence. Even as her three leads hew to their often lonely paths, they all build meaningful, life-sustaining human connections.

Mercifully, those connections are not forged across time and space; all three stories remain discrete, never approaching a moment of grandiose metaphysical convergence. Whatever joys, tragedies, or groundbreaking discoveries await the characters beyond the parameters of each slender chapter, we never find out; from the standpoint of the ginkgo tree, whose time on earth is measured in centuries and millennia, even the fullest of human lives is a minor blip. The characters’ importance to the narrative rests solely on their unique and unfashionable affinity for, and brief encounters with, the greenery in their midst; it’s on the actors to invest them with a deeper emotional significance, which they do, beautifully. Wedler (whose performance here won an acting prize at the Venice Film Festival last fall) and Brumm embody the fierce determination and defiance of youth. Leung, in a rare foray into European cinema, is a serene elder statesman, tempering his character’s intense drive—his excitement in the face of a potential scientific breakthrough—with a gently imploring decency and restraint. He and the ginkgo tree make especially memorable scene partners, united in their essential comfort with their surroundings and their ability to magnetize the camera without speaking a word.

Of all the protagonists, it is Tony who goes the furthest toward achieving a state of genuine communion with nature, in a late, trippy sequence that sends a tasteful shudder of erotic energy through the picture: call it “Lush, Caution.” As much as Enyedi enjoys positioning her camera among the branches, “Silent Friend” is ultimately too invested in the power of human faces and bodies to adopt a purely plant-centric perspective; what it achieves is more of a hybrid gaze, which encourages us to marvel at creation in all its forms. Tony’s experiment becomes a strange, moving act of faith, and it presages a vision of autumnal splendor toward which the film, for all its non-linear narrative games, has been steadily moving all along. The botanical garden—like a gender-restrictive university, or a locked-down society—is shown to be a closed system that demands to be opened. Its future depends on its ability to adapt, receive, communicate, and evolve. ♦