Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan uses the three-hour running time of The Wild Pear Tree (2018) to give considerable scope to individual encounters. Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) spends a lot of the movie walking, often wandering around deep in thought, and a recurring pattern within the narrative is Sinan bumping into someone, and beginning to chat with them. Whether it’s a previous romantic interest working in a field, a successful author studying in the back of a book shop, or two Imams picking apples from a tree, the incidental moment expands in time. What was happenstance gathers momentum in different ways across these moments. The film lifts with the depth of the conversations, and how they deepen and reflect the contradictions of Sinan. The Wild Pear Tree can exist as an example of post-college ennui, specific to Türkiye, as Sinan returns to his hometown of Can after college. Chafing at old faces and being back with his family, specifically the gambling habit and accumulated debts of his father Idris (Murat Cemcir), Sinan contemplates taking an entrance exam for teaching in the countryside, while seeking funding to publish a novel he has written.
Initially we might be on Sinan’s side, but Ceylan uses the length of The Wild Pear Tree to allow for the complications and grey areas in a person. Eventually Sinan seems like a pain in the butt, constantly grouching and railing against his situation, focused on becoming an author, even when his family are in need of money. And even as his father Idris plunges the family further into debt, there’s something charming about his character, a grin at hand and dreams that seem unlikely, such as trying to find a water source in a piece of farmland he owns where he spends his weekends. I really loved Ceylan’s previous film to this, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, and I loved the use of landscape and the individual is placed within it, whether it is the countryside or a town centre. Such an approach continues here, with the seasonal changes adding to the atmosphere and mood over the narrative’s progression. By the last section of The Wild Pear Tree, I was very moved, particularly the grace it gives characters that are thorny and a bit hard to bear at times. Cowritten with Ebru Ceylan and Akin Aksu, whose own background and family mainly inspired the story.
Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 