Ahlat Ağacı
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2018)
At 188 minutes, The Wild Pear Tree is slightly shorter than Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous marathon, but doesn’t come nearly as close to justifying its extraordinary length. Ceylan’s protagonist is a young Turkish man called Sinan (Aydın Doğu Demirkol). At the start of the film, he returns, after graduating college, to his home town of Çan, a rural backwater. Ceylan obviously didn’t intend the link but the town’s name is apt: Sinan feels locked up there. He prepares for a teaching qualification exam but without enthusiasm. What he wants is a writing career: he’s already produced a collection of pieces about his native heath. Although he sees a few school contemporaries in Çan, doing so fails to rekindle friendships (and there’s no evidence that he made any friends at college, in the seaport city of Çanakkale). His mother Asuman (Bennu Yıldırımlar) considers book learning a waste of time – a view shaped by her marriage to Sinan’s father Idris (Murat Cemcir). An educated man and a schoolteacher, Idris is addicted to betting on horses. His gambling debts have reduced his family to virtual poverty. After flunking his teaching exam, Sinan turns his attention to trying to get his work published.
The screenplay is by Ceylan, his wife Ebru and Akın Aksu (a new collaborator, who also appears in the film). As in Winter Sleep, the script includes some unusually lengthy dialogues. On a trip back to Çanakkale, Sinan tracks down Süleyman (Serkan Keskin), a successful writer, to seek his help. They talk in a bookshop for well over ten screen minutes though Sinan shows no talent for ingratiating himself. Not much shorter and similarly abortive is an interview with a Çan businessman keen to promote local talent but less keen on the sound of what Sinan has written. Later, Sinan comes across two youngish imams (Akın Aksu and Öner Erkan) helping themselves to apples from a tree in the countryside above Çan. A (rare) light-hearted remark from Sinan about forbidden fruit is the start of a theological debate among the trio as they walk back into town. (Sinan seems not to be religious; one of the imams is more progressive than the other.) Each of these three exchanges is engaging while it’s happening; Ceylan’s long shot of Sinan and the imams walking downhill is eyecatching. But the conversations count for little once they’re over. Not only are these interlocutors never seen again (except for Süleyman, in an image advertising his latest book); the impact on Sinan of all they say is, as far as we can tell, negligible.
The same applies, and more’s the pity, to his meeting with Hatice (Hazar Ergüçlü). Sinan runs into this young woman, whom he knows from schooldays, at an early stage of the film, during one of his aimless country walks. In her brief time on screen, Hatice comes across as The Wild Pear Tree’s most vivid and confounding character. At first, she’s wearing a headscarf and tells Sinan she’s soon to be wed, to an older man – indications that she’s settling down into a traditional existence in the place where she’s always lived. On the other hand, Hatice has recently started smoking; kisses Sinan with a mixture of passion, humour and aggression (the kiss includes a bite); and, when he asks her what her heart says about her forthcoming marriage, replies, ‘When did my heart say anything?’ Much later on, when his mother remarks, in a slightly puzzled tone, on Sinan’s lack of girlfriends, she’s voicing what this viewer had been wondering for some time. The scene with Hatice is unique in hinting at any kind of sexual or romantic feeling on Sinan’s part.
He eventually gets enough money together (how is less clear) to have his collection of sketches, entitled ‘The Wild Pear Tree’, privately printed. He hands his mother a copy of the book, with an inscription dedicating it to her. She tearfully tells Sinan she always knew he’d amount to something but she never gets round to reading the book: that earlier dismissal of things cultural tells us more about Asuman than her weeping does. Sinan’s younger sister Yasemin (Asena Kescinki) doesn’t read the book either and she’s far from alone. There’s a break in the narrative while Sinan does his national service (which lasts up to twelve months in Turkey). He subsequently returns to a bookshop where he lodged copies of ‘The Wild Pear Tree’ before conscription and the bookseller reports no sales. The volume’s sole reader and enthusiast turns out to be, to Sinan’s astonishment, Idris. That astonishment reflects an important but unsatisfactory element of Ceylan’s film.
It’s understandable that Sinan despises the father who has brought his family into debt and disrepute (and who, at one point, steals money that Sinan has saved to get his work published). The son’s assumption that Idris has no pride or interest in him or his writing is harder to fathom: though not implausible, it isn’t backed up by other revealed aspects of Sinan’s nature. You get the sense he needs to suppose what he does in order to deliver a relatively dramatic climax to The Wild Pear Tree. After taking so much time to tell Sinan’s story, Ceylan seems suddenly anxious to resolve matters although he goes about it selectively.
By the time Sinan comes back from national service, Idris has retired from teaching and moved out of the family home to work as a shepherd; it isn’t clear whether and, if so, how he beat his gambling addiction. (Putting a bit of physical distance between himself and the betting shop in Çan isn’t a wholly convincing explanation.) Looking round his father’s hillside shack, Sinan finds Idris’s wallet and, tucked inside it, a newspaper cutting – an article about the publication of ‘The Wild Pear Tree’. For the first time in the film, the young man is moved to tears. In the conversation that follows, Idris says how important the book has become to him; his quotes from it prove to Sinan that his father knows the text well. Idris also observes that his son’s portrait of him pulls no punches and that this is as it should be. The same conversation spells out too the metaphorical meaning of the film’s (and presumably of Sinan’s book’s) title. People like us, Idris tells his son, are like the fruit of the wild pear tree – ‘misfits, solitary, misshapen’. Even so, he adds, wild pears taste good.
Murat Cemcir plays this crucially revealing scene very well and his scapegrace charm repeatedly enlivens proceedings. Bennu Yıldırımlar’s lower-key naturalistic style complements Cemcir’s effectively. In the smaller roles, Hazar Ergüçlü and Tamer Levent stand out. (Levent, so good in Winter Sleep, is Sinan’s grandfather, a retired imam.) But The Wild Pear Tree depends heavily on the lead actor and Ceylan sets Aydın Doğu Demirkol an impossible task. The script keeps opaque what makes the main character tick; and the heavy-featured, saturnine Demirkol rarely goes beyond describing Sinan’s behaviour. Worse, he makes his salient qualities – his discontent, impatience and self-absorption – dull.
Ceylan prioritises words to perhaps a greater extent than any other auteur currently at work, leading critics such as Adam Mars-Jones and Jonathan Romney, in reviewing The Wild Pear Tree, to question the strength of his commitment to cinematic language. That seems harsh insofar as Ceylan, with his cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki, is still creating beguiling visuals. There’s one at the very start of this film, as Sinan sits in a Çanakkale café, shortly before his journey home to Çan: the camera watches him through the café’s plate glass window in which the movement of nearby waters is reflected. Although it’s lovely, the image stands out as a composition for the sake of it (compare the striking opening images in Roma, which are integrated with other aspects of what follows). The same goes for that long shot of Sinan and the two imams strolling downhill, even for the beautiful moment when a breeze stirs first leaves on a tree, then Hatice’s long hair. Ceylan frames a four-way family argument – Sinan, Idris, Asuman and Yasemin – in the doorway of their home. He holds the shot well beyond the point at which the viewer perceives how ‘imprisoned’ the family are.
A recurring image of flies crawling over faces – first of Idris as he dozes in the heat, later of a baby in a dream sequence – is arresting. Ceylan repeatedly destabilises reality and the effect, at first anyway, is startling, especially when Sinan finds himself trapped in a building from which he can’t escape, in what proves to be a daymare of claustrophobia. Mars-Jones and Romney have a point nevertheless. The long passages of dialogue and the comparatively rationed visual highlights make you wonder if Ceylan includes the latter because he thinks that, as a film-maker, he should, rather than because he wants to. And Mars-Jones’s familiar adverse comments on the use of music in a film are right in this instance:
‘Ceylan uses the first few variations of Bach’s organ Passacaglia, arranged for piano on its first appearance and subsequently for orchestra, sensibly taking its stately sorrow out of church to fit a new cultural context. Even so, he seems to pour Bach’s music over his narrative like a sort of luxury gravy, hoping that its expressive restraint will stick.’
In the land outside Idris’s shack there’s a deep pit. For years, Idris has been spending part of his weekends trying to dig a well there. Close to the end of the film, he looks down into the pit and is horrified to see that Sinan has hanged himself. The audience isn’t likely to share this horror because we know Idris must be dreaming. This is partly because Ceylan pulled a similar trick when Sinan was trapped in the building but also because we can’t believe this protagonist would summon up the emotional energy to commit suicide. Perhaps he’s meant to be representative and Nuri Bilge Ceylan is using a creatively ambitious member of Sinan’s generation to paint a larger picture of present-day Turkey. But The Wild Pear Tree doesn’t play out as any kind of national epic. It seems a major undertaking only in terms of its length. Its (anti-)hero isn’t so much an angry young man as a grumpy one.
5 December 2018