By Mónica Delgado

It seems that a particular film was left for the end of the projections here in Cannes: an intimate film which describes from a different angle the usual universe of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With the same existential worries, and again, like in Winter Sleep, the lead character is a writer, here young and arrogant, that will be able to find answers to his different questions about his role in the world, coming and going from his hometown.

In The Wild Pear Tree, nature takes an extraordinary dimension as a conditioning factor to the actions and behaviors of the characters chosen by Bilge Ceylan for his epic of learning, a three-hour long film which isn’t afraid to invoke an unusual sense of humor, almost absent in the other films of the Turkish filmmaker. The space, and the tree of the title, as metaphors to capture something the lead character, a young writer returning from home after graduation, hasn’t assumed as part of his emotional legacy. The return to home becomes problematic, and Bilge Ceylan translates it through dialogues about different topics, from politics to religion and the economic crisis.

The great value of a film like The Wild Pear Tree, a candidate to the Golden Palm, relies in its staging, of long dialogues and extended shots which give form to a marginalized province, where the young writer wishes to affirm himself as a writer, dealing with a hostile reality, not tailored to his necessities. If maybe, this is the Ceylan’s least ambitious film (as to forms and cinematographic resources), there is an intention for the episode and analogy (through dreams, which are placed as possibilities of narration) which conform the corpus of existential dwelling of its character.

The Wild Pear Tree might be one of the most endearing films about the relation of father and son (in its encounters and distances), a film which is portrayed in a lyrical, memorable sense by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Official Competition
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Script: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan
Cinematography: Gökhan Tiryaki
Producer: Zeynep Özbatur Atakan
Turkey, 2018