The Wild Pear Tree | Little White Lies

The Wild Pear Tree

28 Nov 2018 / Released: 30 Nov 2018

Autumnal forest path, two figures walking on wooden boardwalk surrounded by yellow leaves and sunlit foliage.
Autumnal forest path, two figures walking on wooden boardwalk surrounded by yellow leaves and sunlit foliage.
3

Anticipation.

The last five films from this Turkish master took home prizes at Cannes. This one got zip.

4

Enjoyment.

Verbose. Riveting. Extraordinary.

5

In Retrospect.

Ceylan’s best film? It just might be.

Turkey’s fore­most drama­tist returns with his most impos­ing and impres­sive film to date.

Giv­en that Nuri Bilge Cey­lan is yet to cel­e­brate his 60th birth­day, it would be pre-emp­tive to describe The Wild Pear Tree as a late-peri­od film in the director’s career. It cer­tain­ly has the feel of one though; the kind of unfash­ion­ably heavy­weight work of an old mas­ter that used to turn up a cou­ple of times a decade from the likes of the late Greek doyen of slow cin­e­ma’, Theo Angelopoulos.

Ceylan’s first films, lead­ing up to the name-mak­ing Uzak in 2002, dis­sect the social and gen­er­a­tional chasms between rur­al and urban lives. A mod­ern, deriv­a­tive study in roman­tic ennui and an exer­cise in genre fol­lowed with Cli­mates and Three Mon­keys, before an expan­sive change of tack in Once Upon a Time in Ana­to­lia and the Palme d’Or win­ning Win­ter Sleep.

These major lat­er works take their struc­tur­al cues from Ceylan’s clear pas­sion for the doorstops of Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture, and his lat­est proves no excep­tion. If the spir­it of Tol­stoy lives in The Wild Pear Tree’s rav­ish­ing rur­al vis­tas, and Chekhov in the ges­tur­al details of small-town life, it’s the dialec­ti­cal tem­plate of Dos­toyevsky that’s been car­ried through most clear­ly from Win­ter Sleep’s riffs on The Broth­ers Karamazov’.

Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) is an aspir­ing writer, new­ly returned from col­lege to the fam­i­ly home. He’s writ­ten his first book, a quirky auto-fic­tion meta-nov­el” that shares its name with those gnarled, stunt­ed trees” of the film’s title. With a three-hour plus run­ning time ahead, Cey­lan appears to set the stage for a cin­e­mat­ic bil­dungsro­man of self-actu­al­i­sa­tion, putting his pro­tag­o­nist through a series of encoun­ters on the path to enlight­en­ment. But Sinan’s a tricky cus­tomer. Despair­ing of the town he’d hap­pi­ly drop an atom­ic bomb on,” most of his dis­dain is saved for his father (Murat Cem­cir, extra­or­di­nary), the flawed gam­bling addict in whom Sinan glimpses his own poten­tial future.

It’s a por­trait of the artist as an enti­tled young man. While Sinan’s nov­el aspires to the poet­ry of rur­al liv­ing, Ceylan’s film mines the ten­sion between a roman­ti­cal­ly ide­alised vision of the artis­tic life and the sub­jec­tive truths of those Sinan views as fod­der for his lit­er­ary pursuits.

There is more than one real­i­ty,” exclaims a suc­cess­ful local writer in the film’s key exchange, one of the many cir­cuitous con­ver­sa­tions that serve as The Wild Pear Tree’s struc­tur­al back­bone. Cey­lan approach­es these ide­o­log­i­cal con­fronta­tions with an ele­gant prag­ma­tism, before frac­tur­ing them with poet­ic grace notes. Sinan is the pro­tag­o­nist, but Ceylan’s ambigu­ous intru­sions serve to under­mine the sure­ty of his sub­jec­tive real­i­ty. These for­mal abstrac­tions elu­ci­date his roman­tic van­i­ty, or in the case of a (dreamt?) chase sequence, his Kaf­ka-esque anxieties.

How can a writer be cred­i­ble if he can’t see his real self?” asks Sinan, and come the film’s tran­scen­dent final sequence, the ques­tion remains. It’s like a test of your self-image,” he says of writ­ing, Try as you may to hide it, it reveals itself some­how.” Ceylan’s inter­ro­ga­tion of said artis­tic self-image sin­u­ous­ly extracts its rev­e­la­tions, but it’s left open as to whether Sinan will ever see the wood for the wild pear trees.

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