The Wild Pear Tree review: Beguiling lyricism with biting social observation about life in contemporary Turkey

Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Starring: Aydın Doǧu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yıldırımlar, Hazar Ergüçlü, Serkan Keskin, Tamer Levent. Cert 15, 188 mins.

In spite of its lengthy running time, this latest feature from Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of his most accessible. It combines flights of beguiling lyricism with biting social observation about life in contemporary Turkey, as experienced by its hapless hero, a young would-be writer. There is a bleak and ironic humour here too.

The Wild Pear Tree is episodic, unfolding in a series of Chekhovian vignettes involving Sinan (Dogu Demirkol). This is a portrait of the young artist told in reverse. Generally, the protagonists of such stories have escaped their home towns and are looking back on their experiences from the outside. Sinan, though, is coming back to where he started.

He has returned home from college while he waits to take the exam that will qualify him as a teacher (his father’s profession). He doesn’t know, though, where he will be posted. Jobs are hard to come by. He still has his military service to face.

The father, Idris (Murat Cemcir), has a destructive gambling habit which threatens to ruin the family. He is an impulsive and charming man but not a practical one. Sinan loves and despises him. The young man’s dream is to become a published author. He needs financial support for this. There is something comic and forlorn about his attempts to find patrons.

He is self-important and a little pompous, and doesn’t welcome being back in a provincial backwater where no one appreciates his genius. A mood of lethargy and fatalism is shared by his friends. One, serving in the army, talks about beating up protesters as if it is a form of recreation. Another comes to blows with him over a beautiful woman, about to be married off to a wealthy, older man.

In one of the film’s strangest, most magical scenes, Sinan encounters this woman in the fields. She behaves like a siren, teasing and tantalising him.

There is a poignant interlude in which Sinan corners a well known local author and engages him in conversation. While pretending to be an admirer, Sinan doesn’t hide his disdain for this author or his jealousy at his success. He thinks his own debut book, The Wild Pear Tree, will be very much better. Ceylan gently mocks his pretentiousness and brings him back down to earth. As Sinan’s literary career stalls even before it starts, the other author’s poster is still in the bookstore window to remind him of his own failure.

Ceylan has a knack for staging what seem to be throwaway conversations in which characters will suddenly touch on the most profound and personal subjects. For example, in one extraordinary section lasting several minutes, Sinan meets two Imams eating fruit from a tree.

They start talking, walk through the village together and, under the guise of making small talk, discuss truth, morality and the nature of religious belief. Equally impressive is the way the director films the natural world, throwing in often awesomely beautiful sequences of forests, raging seas and snow filled landscapes. Against such backdrops, the problems of Sinan and his family seem inconsequential.

Sinan isn’t an especially sympathetic protagonist. He’s impatient and priggish. He doesn’t like people. Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel sympathy for him as he sees his opportunities and dreams crumble around him. In his forlorn pursuit of art, beauty and truth, he is shown here as a heroic figure as well as an absurd one.