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The Wild Pear Tree
****
Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Starring: Dogu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yildrim
(Turkey, 15, 3hr 8mins)
Another Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, another lonesome melancholic male solipsist. In the hands of a lesser director, his work would be exceedingly self-indulgent and boring, but his ascension to the annals of the great modern directors is predicated largely on his novelistic attention to detail in his characters – it’s no surprise that both The Wild Pear Tree and his previous film, the Palme D’or-winning Winter Sleep have been compared to Chekhov, so dense and interior is the characterisation.
In The Wild Pear Tree, we follow Sinan (Dogu Demirkol), a young university graduate returning to his hometown, near Canakkale (the site of both the city of Troy and Gallipoli). He’s just written a novel about the area, which he hopes to publish, and is torn as to what to do with his life; he can either become a teacher, like his father (now a seemingly hopeless layabout with a gambling problem), or do his military service first and then return to become a teacher anyway. Sinan mostly procrastinates. The Wild Pear Tree, at over three hours long, is built mostly out of a series of long conversations with people Sinan visits as he returns home, though many of the characters don’t appear again.
It’s certainly not a film that makes any concessions towards mainstream tastes, and it’s all the better for it. It is easy to lose yourself in the film’s many long conversations, or in its exquisite cinematography and visual poetry. One particularly long conversation, between Sinan and two imams (one of whom is more than a little bit immoral and happy to bend the rules) delves deep into theology and morality. Ultimately, they all seem to go nowhere – much like how Sinan doesn’t feel he’s going anywhere. The camera swirls around them, tracking them through fields and paths as they walk, but ultimately, we arrive nowhere.
One wonders, at times, if Sinan is interesting enough to make a three-hour film out of. As strong as The Wild Pear Tree is, its protagonist is not as fascinating as those in Ceylan’s previous two films, the existentialist doctor of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and the isolated hotelier of Winter Sleep. We’ve seen solipsistic young men, unsure of their future direction, contemplating the futility of life many times in cinema. Sinan bugs a famous local author with needling pointless questions until the author bursts out in anger. He ends up in a fight with a friend about an old flame. He walks out midway through his teaching exam. Sure, the protagonist of Winter Sleep was an unlikeable, arrogant old man, but he had a multitude of complexities, and at times I wonder if Sinan is complex at all, or if he is just straining for complexity, as so many young men do. We compare him to his father, who hides his gambling problem from his family and has debts all over town, but his father at least has a sense of who he is, even if he is a failure. The contradiction between this and the way he mistreats his family via his ignorance is one of the film’s key dramatic points, as it forms the centre of Sinan’s relationship with him.
The Wild Pear Tree is rooted in the geography of Canakkale, just as all of Ceylan’s films are rooted in the geography of where they’re set. It is a small city with a proud sense of itself because of the history in its vicinity (it is near the site of Gallipoli and the ancient city of Troy). One local businessman who Sinan is told to visit in the hopes of funding his book, an apparent bookworm, turns out to be a shill who uses his “culturedness” to gain local government favour. He makes empty, hollow statements about the local history, chiding Sinan for not writing about the area in an positive, promotional way. I know the sort: the kind whose basic pride in where they’re from overtakes any consideration of the locality’s flaws and contradictions. But I also understand those who chide Sinan in more subtle ways, for coming across a big-city kid back to tell the homelanders how backward, quaint, and unimaginative they can be – which he is guilty of. As an aside, this is perhaps the most contemporarily political of all Ceylan’s films thus far, and it’s hard not to read the businessman, the imams and many other minor characters as cipher’s for Erdogan’s Turkey
There are also wry moments of humour – Ceylan knows his style can sometimes be overbearing, and often drops little visual jokes. The three hours don’t exactly fly by, but they do wash over the viewer, providing you’re prepared to align your inner tempo with Ceylan’s contemplative, melancholic mood. The Wild Pear Tree is not quite the unfettered masterpieces that his previous two films are, but it is nevertheless, superb.
words Fedor Tot
Out now in cinemas