The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2018) (Patreon)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a filmmaker who generates highly original films that nevertheless wear their influences on their sleeve. Distant, the film that brought him to international attention, featured a comic scene in which the protagonist puts on a tape of Tarkovsky's Stalker in order to drive his rural cousin out of the room. Once he's gone, he puts on the porno that he wanted to watch in the first place. If you consider the angular vistas and unpeopled landscapes of Distant on their own merits, however, it's hard not to be reminded of Antonioni's 60s masterworks of urban alienation. 

Later works such as Climates, Three Monkeys, and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia were more literary in their aspirations, seeming to mine the vein of modern drama from the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly Ibsen and Chekhov. One could also detect hints of Tolstoy (in Three Monkeys) and especially Dostoyevsky (in Anatolia). So it was not entirely surprising that Ceylan, finally aiming for the rafters, made Winter Sleep, his longest and most dramaturgical film to date, by adapting several stories by Chekhov. The results were mixed, in part because the staginess of the exercise was not always particularly well integrated into Ceylan's interest in the painterly elements of Anatolia, so everything tended to come to a standstill of monologues punctuated by wide-angle landscape. On the other hand, Ceylan's cinematic influences had clearly evolved, the director finding himself less enamored of Antonioni's aggressive modernism and more at home within the theatrical subtleties of Ingmar Bergman.

Many found Winter Sleep unbearably ponderous, if not outright pretentious. The fact that it won the Palme d'Or in 2014 has done nothing to improve its reputation, as it's come to be seen as a prize for a lesser film by an artist judged as "due." (Cf. Theo Angelopoulous' Eternity and a Day, or David Lynch's Wild at Heart.) Ceylan, certainly willing to thumb his nose at those critics who dismissed the film, has returned with The Wild Pear Tree, an equally long film that is precisely about the problem of pretension. 

It follows the exploits of a young college graduate, Sinan (Dogu Demirkol), who has written a manuscript about his hometown of Çan, a place he considers to be an unsophisticated backwater. He is insistent that his book, an "essay-fiction meta-novel," holds up a dark, truthful mirror to the world around him, making it far richer and more valuable than the mere touristic writing that, he believes, characterizes the literary output of the area. Sinan is brash, rude, and exceedingly callow, taking pride in unearned misanthropy and conducting himself with the arrogance of a gifted but inexperienced child. (I must admit, the character of Sinan made me cringe at many points in the film, since I recognized undignified moments of my young adulthood in him, and I suspect others will as well.)

Although the plot of The Wild Pear Tree is meandering, dealing with such matters as Sinan's failure to pass a teacher's exam, or whether he will raise the funds to publish his book (also called "The Wild Pear Tree"), much of the substance of Ceylan's film consists of lengthy conversations between Sinan and various interlocutors, or victims as the case may be. He encounters an old college friend (Hazar Ergüçlü) who is about to be married, and mocks her for settling into domestic life; he meets up with her former boyfriend (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) and provokes him into violence; he corners a popular local author (Serkan Keskin) in a bookstore and asks him a series of increasingly insulting questions; and, seeking a grant for publication of his book, he visits an industrial gravel-pit owner (Kubliay Tunçer) and proceeds to criticize the kinds of books he has funded in the past.

But most of Sinan's contempt is reserved for his father Idris (Murat Cimcir), a schoolteacher who is admittedly a screw-up. He has a gambling problem and is more than willing to let his family's electricity be cut, or go into debt with shady characters who will threaten his life, in order to keep playing the horses. Within this Muslim community, this brings widespread shame on the family, as well as material poverty, and there appears to be no real concept of gambling as an addition. It is treated, by family and strangers alike, as a basic character flaw. 

Idris tries to normalize relations with Sinan upon his return from college, offering him test-taking advice or getting him to help him dig out a well on his grandfather's farm, but such normalcy is but a think veneer. Sinan's mother (Bennu Yildirimlar) expects Sinan to confront his dad, as a male responsibility, but Sinan insists that she should either leave him or deal with him, that "The Loser" is not his problem anymore.

As one may expect, Sinan finds that "The Loser" has a few things to teach him still, and that with rapprochement comes a bit of much-needed wisdom for this kid who is not nearly as worldly as he thinks he is. Ceylan cannot exactly stick the landing, since there is only one place for the film to go and it does feel a bit artificial when it inevitably goes there. Father and son even discuss the metaphor of the "wild pear tree," although, as a piece of meta-fiction itself, the film allows for a certain intentional heavy-handedness with respect to its dominant ideas. Sinan is not as clever as he thinks, and to make The Wild Pear Tree a model of subtlety would, ironically, defeat the purpose.

Rumor has it that an even longer edit was submitted to Cannes and the festival brass made Ceylan cut it down to this 190 minute length. Whether or not that's true, this final version does feel exceedingly choppy on a formal level. There are temporal jumps that are almost Pialatian, but in no way feel modernist or intentional. Rather, parts of the film feel missing. This is a shame, because the extended sections of The Wild Pear Tree, with Sinan and his adversaries engaging in battles of wits (innocence vs. experience, in multiple rounds), represent top notch filmmaking. I hope a director's cut emerges, because this could be a work of compromised greatness.