Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest follows a would-be writer’s reluctant return to his small-town fold, spinning an extensive series of encounters into a typically rich, wry, melancholic mood-piece.
Ceylan expertly draws your eye and ear to the drama behind the drama, and gives the most gently naturalistic scenes the weight and grain of visions.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2018
The Wild Pear Tree 2018
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“The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie from the Turkish filmmaker and former Palme winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan: garrulous, humorous and lugubrious in his unmistakable and very engaging style. It’s an unhurried, elegiac address to the idea of childhood and your home town – and how returning to both has a bittersweet savour…
An ambitious, malcontent young graduate and would-be writer comes back to his rural village with a diploma but no job… The graduate is Sinan (Aydın Doğu Demirkol), who has come back with ambiguous feelings about the place where he grew up. As for so many writers, his home looks wonderful when he is away from it, when it is tamed and transformed by his imagination. But actually being there reminds him of all its irritations and absurdities. Sinan is from a village near the port of Çanakkale, a tourist destination on account of being near the site of the Gallipoli campaign, and also the ancient city of Troy…
His father is Idris, tremendously played by Murat Cemcir, a man whose youthful charm and romanticism has curdled with age into a pre-emptive bluster and cajoling. He is a gambling addict who has borrowed money all over town; his addiction has kept his family on the poverty line…
The question of life, and the gamble on life that we are required to make in our early 20s, runs under the movie’s meandering path. It is another deeply satisfying, intelligent piece of film-making from Ceylan. The indulgent Idris tells his son that he often has a wild pear for breakfast and it is delicious. This film is, too.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian