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THE WILD PEAR TREE
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The Wild Pear Tree review - Nuri Bilge Ceylan's delicious, humane tableaux
The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie from the Turkish film-maker 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. As in his previous film, Winter Sleep, he draws on the spirit of Chekhov. But his style is all his own: not Chekhovian, but Ceylanian. There are scenes in which people placidly watch TV: largely histrionic soaps whose contrast to the film itself is a type of comedy the director playfully allows us to notice. In fact, The Wild Pear Tree is not unlike a telenovela of family life, taken at a very high-minded, andante pace.
An ambitious, malcontent young graduate and would-be writer comes back to his rural village with a diploma but no job. Now he has to decide whether to take the exams to be a teacher like his old man. There is also his military service to get out of the way. He senses defeat and disappointment with life in some of those local friends and family he has left behind - or is it that he has projected on to them his own dread of a failure yet to come? Has he misread their humility and acceptance and miscalculated the price he will have to pay for his yearned-for differentness from them, and for all that glamorous big-city success?
he 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 first world war Gallipoli campaign, and also the ancient city of Troy. We see Sinan at one stage trudging past a huge statue of the Trojan horse, built for the Brad Pitt movie Troy and now reverently maintained in the city.
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