Review: The Wild Pear Tree Richly Weaves the Political and the Personal

Back in his hometown of Çan in western Turkey, recent college graduate Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) passes under a replica of the Trojan horse that looms over the town square. The kitschy monument to the Çanakkale province’s claim to fame—the region contains the archaeological site of the ancient city-state—is the most fraught metaphor in director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s highly symbolic The Wild Pear Tree. Its presence in the frame points directly toward the dominance of tourism in the economy of Sinan’s provincial hometown. It also foreshadows, more indirectly, his father Idris’s (Murat Cemcir) addiction to horse betting—and, more allusively, suggests the weight of the familial, literary, religious, and political legacies that the disaffected Sinan grapples with in the film.

Brimming over with significance, the Trojan horse is like Ceylan’s film itself, which compellingly, if not efficiently, captures the various forces that shape Sinan’s life, from family obligations to religion to local and global politics. The Wild Pear Tree takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual, and one would have as much trouble pegging down its genre as Sinan has describing the eponymous book of essays he’s trying publish. The film contains some four main plotlines that develop and converge through its three-hour runtime. Home for Eid al-Fitr, and with a fresh degree in literature, Sinan meets with local luminaries who might fund his publishing project. While in town, Sinan also has a state teacher’s exam to take, after which he will probably be assigned to a school somewhere in the desolate eastern provinces of Turkey.

Meanwhile, during the week, the kindly but troubled Idris, a primary school teacher, is betting away his salary, which puts his family on the brink of financial ruin. On weekends, Idris escapes to a village outside the city to pursue a pet project on the family’s rural property, digging a well that may never be finished. To little avail, he tries to recruit both his father (Tamer Levent) and son to assist in the probably futile task. In Sinan’s meetings with Çan’s mayor and a local sand-mining magnate, as well as in his initial interactions with his father, he seems for the most part a sympathetic idealist struggling against a complaisant and corrupted older generation. But Ceylan and his co-screenwriters, Akin Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, endow their main character with an arrogant truculence that often undermines his grandstanding. Although his writing allegedly gives voice to life in Çanakkale apart from the area’s storied history, Sinan superciliously demeans the region and pretentiously scorns the writing of a famous local author, Mr. Suleyman (Serkan Keskin).

Sinan’s overt selfishness is sometimes as alienating as it is ironically humorous, but at its root, the confused ambivalence he feels toward his hometown is relatable and grounded. Much of the petulant resentment he exudes is clearly frustration channeled from his inability to fully confront Idris’s disgraceful gambling habit. His mother (Bennu Yildirimlar) alternates between encouraging him to respect his father and chiding him for not doing his part in corralling the man’s compulsive behavior. It’s easy to see why Sinan doesn’t quite have the appreciation for the sights and atmosphere of Çan that cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki’s lush photography does. We often follow Sinan as he walks around the town and its environs, head drooping, while around him the camera highlights the area’s rolling hills and autumnal colors.

Interrupting The Wild Pear Tree’s gradually progressing through lines is a series of extended asides and contemplative tangents that sometimes slip without notice into Sinan’s unconscious mind. His chance encounter with an old crush (Hazar Ergüçlü), a passive-aggressive confrontation with Suleyman after a chance meeting in a book shop, and his friendly debate with two imams about the relation between Islam and the modern world give the film an ambulatory quality. These extended conversations de-emphasize the plot in favor of an exploration of Sinan’s world—and, by extension, life in rural Turkey.

Ceylan’s camera pursues its own fascinating asides, often detaching itself from Sinan to gaze upward through tree branches, to track slowly across the barren field of his family’s rural property, to reframe a scene with a slow zoom, or to jump-cut to another point in a conversation. The camera movements are languid but often jarring, creating hypnotic images that force the viewer’s attention. At points, the film looks not unlike a latter-day Andrei Tarkovsky film, not least because, as in that director’s The Sacrifice, one of its anchoring symbolic images is a dead tree on Idris’s property. The Wild Pear Tree’s stylistic flourishes aren’t deployed only to express Sinan’s state of mind, but also represent, elliptically, the way his subjective experience intermingles with the nature and history of his region.

A rich, textured film, The Wild Pear Tree is ostensibly about patrimony—namely, what sons inherit from and owe to their fathers. In many ways it’s a coming-of-age story, featuring a protagonist whose immature callousness gradually gives way to a more mature openness to his family. But hovering around its margins is the political context of contemporary Turkey, and not just in the many allusions to the tourist industry. Sinan’s resentment toward his family and his hometown is born in part of the economic and social uncertainty faced by a young Turkish man with a degree in the humanities. In one scene, he has a long phone conversation with a fellow literature graduate who’s become a police officer, and the pair laughs about beating student protestors. Ceylan’s implication here might be that, in a country with a destabilizing economy and ongoing educational purges, literary patrimony is being abandoned in favor of brutality and generalized discontent.