The Wild Pear Tree (2018)

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

“You know, sometimes things I see in you, me and even Grandad remind me of a wild pear tree. I don’t know. We’re all misfits, solitary, misshapen.“

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is at the peak of his powers and on an impressive roll: since the Turkish auteur made his first feature film Small Town in 1997, his artistry is unfolding stunningly. He won the Grand Jury Prize of Cannes for both his films, Distant (2002) and the poetic masterpiece that is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), and finally received the festival’s Palme d’Or with his last film Wintersleep (2014). And just when you thought that it can’t get any better than Wintersleep, a masterpiece which surely must have been a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, Ceylan comes along with his best film to date; another finely chiselled map of human existence full of references to Ceylan’s older films, further shaping the organic, closed nature of his oeuvre.

The Wild Pear Tree is the story of Sinan Karasu (Doğu Demirkol), who returns to his hometown in Western Turkey in that adolescent, anarchistic time-frame of lingering in between decisions. Stuck within becoming a teacher and doing his military service, what the young graduate anticipates most is to establish himself as an author with his debut book titled “The Wild Pear Tree”. And he can be a slightly pretentious and rather unlikeable protagonist while doing so. While he initially shows detached contempt for his family and the “small-minded, bigoted“ people of the provincial town and its rural foothills, Sinan goes through a journey that reconnects him with his roots. Literally talking and moving from one place to the other throughout most of the film, Sinan’s steps enhance and mirror the wonderful meditative flow of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s captivating 3-hour introspection that is filled with more life lessons than Sinan is realizing, and the viewer would expect.

Sinan focalizes the entire film and is embedded in a rich social context which offers introspective subplots. He encounters his peers and friends from childhood, which never left the town. He kisses his teenage love who moved on to another boy, only to leave him and settle with the older, wealthy jeweler for convenience. It is a scene of stunning beauty drowning the celluloid in golden October light, one where the ambient sound of the wind in the trees is amplified in an almost intimidating manner, a scene lingering between possibility and disillusionment. In another technically brilliant scene, Sinan meets the two young Imam’s of the town while they are picking apples from somebody else’s tree, from where on the camera follows them walking the paths of the village in one long, beautiful shot, while the three men are having a fascinating conversation about theological questions. In his struggle to get his book published, Sinan encounters writers, politicians, and business-men who teach him about how things work in reality and challenge the dreams and ideals the young man has built up in the sheltered world of college. One can call that disillusionment, or rather a bitter but necessary addition towards completion in one’s world contemplation.

But The Wild Pear Tree is also the story of his touching father, Idris Karasu, played in an outstanding performance by Murat Cemcir. Idris is a hustler with a Mephistophelian charm, a lovely and energetic man whose best days and past glories as the respected town-teacher have long faded because of his gambling addiction, which eventually made the family lose his house. Yet, one does not dare to call him a loser. As always, writer and director Ceylan resists to draw a one-dimensional character of him or delve in Freudian tragedy. In a highly symbolic supraordinate sub-plot, Idris has made it his life task to dig for water in a dry well on his own father’s property. The family’s telling name “Karasu” applies most to him, meaning “dark waters” and evoking the Turkic prefix in “Karamazov”.

As the film moves on, it forces us to understand the father and his life without the humiliation of too many words. We see and sense that he is driven by an ongoing struggle for acceptance by his own father, who is still not taking him seriously. One of the most unforgettable scenes in the film is a careful distortion leaning into surrealism and permeating the meditative beauty of the pictures. We see Idris as a baby, sleeping in his cradle in the garden surrounded by green hills. Just when the scene is lulling the viewer into a peacefulness, the camera zooms in to Idris’ face that is covered with ants- revealing a neglect that left a void he is still trying to fill. In this horror-glitch that creates a context wider than mere introspection, the scene becomes a silent narrative about the suffering of men.

The Wild Pear Tree is distinctively Ceylanian, and one way to define his cinema is by pointing out what is absent compared to other directors and their films. There are no vanities and stylizations in Ceylan’s films, nothing distracting from the beauty and perfection of the photography and dialogues. Ceylan’s protagonists are stripped down, human in all their complexity but otherwise understated. There is never a distracting focus on fashion, furniture or technology, which appears to make the perfect ground for his timeless interior studies, and reversely seems to be a rather big visual aspect that’s preventing other directors to reach Ceylan’s artistic depth and greatness.

Then there is the absence of an ongoing musical soundtrack in Ceylan’s films, which the director regards as a cheap way to conjure emotions in a non-cinematographic manner, a manipulation almost. Ceylan is abandoning sentimental lines, and other than occasionally using one recurring classical theme (Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor“ in Wild Pear Tree), he focuses on the amplification of ambient sound like the wind, water, or a car engine, all of it making the exterior world as extension of the interior palpable. When encountering Ceylan’s protagonists during intense 3-hour films like Winter Sleep or The Wild Pear Tree, the viewer comes to develop a rare and unspoken vast understanding of them, rather than living through instant emotions. There is a closeness that we feel towards Sinan because of this developing understanding towards a character who is otherwise challenging and not always a sympathetic lead role.

Sinan makes the bitter experience of deafening silence followed by the self-publication of his book. Nobody cares, not even his family which is consumed by life and its struggles- his father Idris is the only ones that reads his book. Towards the end of the film, Sinan is doing his military service after failing the recruitment test for admission to civil service. The 18 months in the army are wrapped up in a single short scene where we see him standing in a snowy landscape in full military gear. Yet, after his service, he seems to have transformed: Sinan talks less, but acts, resembling the dialectic of Faust’s initiation which starts with “In the beginning was the Word,” and moves to “In the beginning was the Act“. It is a transformation that culminates into both a shocking and devastatingly beautiful ending scene. It is not a conclusion following the often repeated and somewhat simple narratives of forgiveness and reconciliation, but silent yet vast and powerful understanding of not only the other, but on how all things ought to be.

In the end, Sinan is not only becoming a man in what is a classical Turkish coming-of-age setting, but has turned around the narratives of the burden of cosmic determination in favor of the nobility of same. He has come to accept the ever-repeating cycle and determination of every young man within his own family’s saga, that of one day becoming the new man and maker. And with that, the meaning of his first name finally comes to realization: Sinan, the spearhead. Moving along the dark waters.

by Saliha Enzenauer

Read all stories in our special about Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his films:
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011)
Winter Sleep (2014)
The Wild Pear Tree (2018)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan On His Beginnings And Art- An Interview