Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Wordy, Windy, Wearying ‘The Wild Pear Tree’ [Cannes Review]

At least it’s mostly outdoors. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s new Cannes competition title, “The Wild Pear Tree,” an extravagantly wordy, three-hour-plus rumination on masculinity and morality in modern Turkey, cannot but be compared to his last Cannes title, the Palme d’Or-winning “Winter Sleep,” an extravagantly wordy three-hour-plus rumination on masculinity and morality in modern Turkey. But where “Winter Sleep” was, to some of us, borderline intolerable in its physical confinement and didacticism, with most of the dense conversations playing out in a room in a shuttered Anatolian hotel, “The Wild Pear Tree” reacquaints us with Ceylan and regular DP Gökhan Tiryaki‘s astonishing affinity for wide-open spaces. Even the most arcane of the exchanges can unfold in the splendor of a dappled summertime field under motive shafts of sunlight or an autumnal orchard set a picturesque path’s walk away from town. This may sound like faint praise because it is, but it is also a considerable relief, marking “The Wild Pear Tree” as a decidedly more inviting prospect than its forbidding predecessor. When you feel about to overdose on verbiage, you can always check out the foliage.

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And this time, rather than a 60-something hotelier trying to hold on to the shreds of his relevance by haranguing his wife and sister with long lectures on culture and religion, we get a younger protagonist, trying to define his place in the adult world, mostly in opposition to his father. Sinan (Aydin Doğu Demirkol) is an unprepossessing young man who’s studying to be a primary school teacher, like his father. But he is also trying to publish a book he has written set in Can, his hometown in northwestern Turkey, to which he returns after term ends to be greeted by men asking politely if he will prevail upon his father Idris (Murat Cemcir) to return the money he owes.

Idris has the irresponsible selfishness of the inveterate gambler, to be sure. But, at least initially, he also has a spark of impishness about him that the lumpen Sinan sorely lacks (as well as their contrasting sensibilities, the hulking Sinan and the vulpine Idris are so distractingly dissimilar in physicality that it’s hard to be convinced they’re father and son). He plays pranks on Sinan’s younger sister (a barely registering presence given even fewer scenes of substance than Sinan’s mother) and genially insists that Sinan come help him with some work on his own father’s land.  Idris is sinking a well into a spot on a hillside where no one but him believes there’ll be water.

They can be companionable, but Idris and Sinan have a relationship more usually brimming with animosity, with Idris’ cackling hyena laugh becoming more mirthless as the film wears on. By the time the whole family is tearing strips off each other about money that Sinan claims has gone missing from his jacket (that he needs in order to vanity-publish his book), one source of frustration with “The Wild Pear Tree” is clear: these people are basically horrible. It is difficult to give a damn about the intellectual or emotional growth of such wilfully bitter, stunted personalities.

And the weirdly cocksure Sinan is not just unpleasant to family members. He also fights with a friend over a girl; is rude to the local businessman who refuses to help publish his book (which Sinan describes as a “quirky, auto-fiction meta-novel” so you can see his point); seeks out a successful local author only to disdain the advice he offers; and has an interminable conversation with two imams in which he challenges their interpretation of Koranic lore. This last unfolds in mid- and long shots, often shooting the speakers from behind so it’s never wholly clear who is talking, even when one dares hazard a glance up at the pictures away from the wall-to-wall subtitling (if Ceylan is going to continue in this vein, it might be less effortful for everyone to just learn Turkish). It is proof that Ceylan sees his supporting cast as mere mouthpieces: walking ideologies, talking points of view, living representations of some aspect of art or culture or politics on which he wants to expound — anything but actual people.

This extends to the film’s women whom the screenplay essentially ghosts, establishing them, like Sinan’s mother, or an old schoolfriend, and then largely dismissing them as irrelevant to the central menfolk’s inner lives. Ceylan has never been much interested in women — in “Winter Sleep” they served almost exclusively as sounding boards for the man’s intellectual journey — and here again they blur into the background noise of everyone in the world who is not Sinan or his dad. “The Wild Pear Tree” suffers from a similar unexamined solipsism to that of many Ceylan protagonists: Perhaps if these men looked outside themselves and broadened their narrow, intellectualized terms of engagement with the world, their loads would lighten, and these artful films would not feel so airless.

Because there are moments here where Ceylan does feel like he’s loosing his imagination rather than taming and laboriously explaining it. Surreal episodes pepper the narrative, including the fairytale-nightmare image of a cot hanging rock-a-bye from the bough of a tree in which a forgotten baby cries, crawling with ants. There’s a lost dog and a feint about a dead body and the film’s snowy epilogue is exceptional. Though it hinges on a rather facile revelation that feels lifted from a ’90s comedy about a career-dad undergoing a change of heart, the final scene between Idris and Sinan is so clever that after three hours, you can find yourself holding your breath. It’s a beautiful, moving finale but it hardly needed all the digressions en route, which basically amount to Ceylan taking the very long (and often scenic) way round to arrive at the simple conclusion that the wild pear does not, after all, fall so very far from the tree. [C+/B-]

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