Review: The Wild Pear Tree

A delicate, complex masterwork from Turkish slow cinema auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The Wild Pear Tree is a departure from the filmmaker’s usually formalist leanings, a gentle and intelligent bit of self-criticism, and a bridge between generations. Less enthralled by landscapes and more ethereal philosophical musings, The Wild Pear Tree demonstrates Ceylan’s ability to listen to criticisms levied against his award winning works, while simultaneously enhancing them for maximum emotional impact.

I should preface all of this by stating that I’ve never been personally “sold” on Ceylan’s previous, glacially paced works like Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, often thinking they weren’t nearly as deep or hypnotizing as many of his boosters claimed. I’ve thought in the past that all of Ceylan’s films were unnecessarily boring slogs that were forced down my throat like medicine chased with raw chicken livers. There’s something substantial in them, but one has to wade through a lot of unnecessary, indulgent filler that isn’t thoughtful or entertaining. That being said, I absolutely believe that The Wild Pear Tree is an unquestionable masterpiece. Not surprisingly, like many auteurs whose artistic merits I’ve questioned or never actively enjoyed sitting through (Kubrick and Godard being the best examples), The Wild Pear Tree is both the film of Ceylan’s that I find the most fruitful and is one of the director’s least lauded and celebrated effort to date. It’s a shame because The Wild Pear Tree is one of the most poignant and honest depictions of modern artistic fears in years.

Unlike most of Ceylan’s other works, The Wild Pear Tree is a film where there’s always something substantive happening and there isn’t a single wasted breath. Ceylan and cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki still love to revel in the landscapes and scenery of their characters, but they’re not the primary stars of The Wild Pear Tree, with small town Turkish existence taking precedence, and not the town itself. The Wild Pear Tree is the first film in Ceylan’s career that’s driven more by dialogue and character than it is by his country’s geography. It’s not that The Wild Pear Tree isn’t a political film. It actually might be his most political film to date. Ceylan nicely cops to this shift in approach when a prominent character – a writer far wiser than the main character – notes that content suffers when form takes precedence, and that internal struggle for the filmmaker is constantly front and centre in this story of a young man and his fracturing family.

Sinan Karsu (Dogu Demirkol) has just returned to his hometown after graduating from college. He’s not particularly thrilled about having to move back in with his homemaker mother (Bennu Yildirimlar), his corny, gambling addicted teacher father (Murat Cemcir), and younger sister (Asena Keskinci), but he’s cockily biding his time until he can get an advance to write his semi-autobiographical novel. Sinan walks through life with a sense of entitlement, finding it unfathomable that someone with his level of refinement or education could ever be turned down or rejected for anything, and his interactions with people from his youth – most of whom have sold out, given up, or left their dreams in the dusty streets – only reinforce his belief that he’s right and everyone else is wrong. He’s fed up with everything: his father’s ineffectiveness, women who choose to marry for long term financial security instead of love, people who join the police force seemingly as a means to act brutally, lazy, yong Imams who keep leaning heavily on the contributions of his elderly grandfather (co-writer Akin Aksu). His biggest fear is not finding work, having to move to the east, and becoming a teacher like his father.

The Wild Pear Tree doesn’t unfurl its elegantly quilted tapestry of a story all at once. Unlike other Ceylan films where the filmmaker wants to give the viewer a lay of every inch of the land, his latest wants to do the same thing except with an eye for character, culture, and current events. There are few conversations in The Wild Pear Tree that clock in under ten minutes in length, and some stretch out for thirty minutes or more. Sometimes the characters are walking and giving viewers a tour of the negative looking spaces around them, and other times – most notably a discussion between Sinan and an increasingly agitated and noteworthy author (Serkan Keskin, in the best performance by an actor in a single scene this year) – they’ll become movies unto themselves. Given Ceylan’s previous proclivity for sparseness, the intricate dialogues with carefully selected words are so rich and meaningful that they feel like they work of someone else entirely. This is exactly the type of film that I didn’t think Ceylan had in him, and it’s positively electrifying to behold.

The Wild Pear Tree works on some level as Ceylan understanding criticisms one could levy against his works. He’s a man from an older generation who gets away with artistic gambles that younger talents in his own country would be laughed at for ever attempting. While he makes no apologies for his art (like any great artist), Ceylan fears that the state of storytelling in his country will only grow worse the more young artisans become jaded. Sinan might be “the last sane man alive” in his own mind, but Ceylan asks the viewer to meet his often unlikable and only occasionally relatable protagonist halfway. There isn’t a single character in The Wild Pear Tree (a title that has a curious double meaning, with both interpretations being literal and metaphorical at the same time) who doesn’t have a concrete, well defined reason for how they act. If one was told at every soul crushing turn that disappointment and immense amounts of bad luck are the result of fate and that success is only achieved through hard work (and not through political connections, nepotism, or other easier inroads), you’d probably go mad, too, especially if you were led to believe that education would open doors to you that were previously closed.

With each passing dialogue, new character, and hour of screen time, additional layers begin to form, building to a powerful conclusion that might be the best and hardest earned moment of Ceylan’s career. It’s a lot to take in, but trust me, it’s all worth it. The Wild Pear Tree is the best pure character study of the year.

The Wild Pear Tree opens exclusively at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, November 23, 2018.

Check out the trailer for The Wild Pear Tree: