I saw a three-hour movie! It’s just not the one everyone else saw this weekend (which I’m probably not going to see, not with the laziest plot device ever at the heart of the story).
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014 for his 196-minute film Winter Sleep, so his follow-up film, last year’s The Wild Pear Tree, was highly anticipated and ended up competing for that same prize at the 2018 festival. The new film was also Turkey’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, although it didn’t make the nine-title shortlist, which has only happened once for any Turkish film (Ceylan’s 2008 title Three Monkeys). The Wild Pear Tree is also long, 188 minutes, and somewhat slow, as there’s very little action of any sort, with most of the film comprising either dialogue or pensive, wide shots of landscape, but there is a novelesque story at the movie’s heart and a strong conclusion that at least provides an adequate payoff for your time investment.
The Wild Pear Tree follows Sinan, who has recently graduated from college and faces an uncertain economic future in modern Turkey, where the best options for recent graduates include serving in the army or joining the police so you can beat up leftist protesters for fun. Sinan plans to take the national exam to qualify to become a teacher, but his real passion is writing, and he is trying to self-publish a work he describes without a sense of irony as a “quirky auto-fiction metanovel.” The film follows him through his return from college to his hometown, where his father has bankrupted the family with his gambling addiction, his grandfather is starting to lose his faculties, and his mother and sister are both stuck in a situation not of their own making. Yet despite the obvious conflict he’s facing with his father, Sinan also comes to realize that these relationships are not binary functions, and that he may relate more to and inherit more from his father than he’d like to admit – while his mother’s love and empathy are more superficial than he understands.
Ceylan’s script here – reportedly pared down from what would have been more like a four-hour running time, God help us – touches on many existential issues that are generally universal but would appear to apply specifically to modern Turkey, a secular nation by its Constitution that has faced rising despotism from its elected leader, Recep Tayyin Erdogan. Turkey’s economy actually began contracting last year, deepening an ongoing malaise that the film reflects in Sinan’s limited employment prospects and general disaffection with the lack of options for him in jobs, in marriage prospects (he refers to himself as a “peasant”), and in geography. He runs into a popular local author and, under the guise of trying to solicit the man’s advice, ends up browbeating him with his own pretentious, juvenile ideas on art and literature, eventually labeling the author a sellout. The scene that turns increasingly contentious and only is resolved in one of the film’s sudden dream sequences (or visions), right after the author, to this point very even-keeled, loses his temper and unloads on Sinan.
The most compelling scene in the movie, a lengthy conversation involving Sinan and two local imams, one conservative and one liberal/progressive, that ranges from the question of God’s (Allah’s) existence to how strictly man should interpret the Koran to the imams’ seeming willingness to pray away the sins and materialism of their quotidian lives. It’s a sort of living thinkpiece, one where Sinan probably has the philosophical upper hand but wields his words clumsily, while the two imams are more eloquent but engage in specious claims about religious texts or morality in the material world, which I assume was in turn some sort of satire or indictment of the active forces in Turkish politics and culture under Erdogan.
This is a long movie that feels longer, but Ceylan at least sticks the landing by returning to the father/son dynamic that opened the movie and recurs multiple times as Sinan leaves and returns from his village and fights with his father over the latter’s profligate ways. The concluding scene, by which point Sinan’s parents have separated, was reminiscent of the speech the father (Michael Stuhlbarg) gave in Call Me By Your Name in its power and its ability to wrap up so much of what the movie as a whole was trying to say. There’s some sleight of hand in the final few shots, although Ceylan foreshadows that by using the same visual trick multiple times in the movie, and the very last image will stay with you for a while … if you make it that far.
