The Wild Pear Tree
An aspiring young author returns home from college to pursue his passion for literature, but is faced with a complicated family dynamic caused by his father’s gambling addiction.
Following up on 2014’s Palme d’Or-winning WINTER SLEEP, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has directed another hypnotic and compelling piece of cinema that confirms him as one of modern cinema’s most intelligent and incisive filmmakers. Using landscape as part of his expressive palette, as he has done so often with his work, Ceylan takes the protagonist of THE WILD PEAR TREE, the young and cocky Sinan, back to his birthplace, the Turkish seaport of Çanakkale on the southern coast of the Dardanelles.
Returning home from college, Sinan must re-enter a difficult family situation with a father who is restless and intransigent, and whose gambling addiction has Sinan’s mother and sister at their wits’ end. He struggles to reorient himself within the family dynamic while trying to come to grips with the next phase of his life. He is planning to become a teacher like his father, but first wants to complete an experimental novel. Sinan’s search for meaning and direction provides the basis for a number of extensive and penetrating conversations that form the emotional and intellectual core of THE WILD PEAR TREE. (source: www.tiff.net)
There is no greater influence on the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan than Russian literature, the director himself often states. Why? “If I didn't see reflections of Turkish people in Russian literature, I wouldn't use it. But it's valid for all humanity. "
This applies in particular to the form of his films. They are grand, epic and often very long, which offers the possibility to elaborate on characters, often through philosophical dialogues. In terms of content, THE WILD PEAR TREE – not by coincident about a young man with great literary ambitions - clearly shows some Chekhovian and Tolstoyan traits. Disillusion, existential fear, family relationships, the bizarre in the everyday - all tragic subjects, although Ceylan brings them witha strong sense of comedy. The director himself said: “I do see humor in even the most tragic situations. I think humor is always the brother of tragedy or sad things; and I think that with humor tragedy becomes more convincing.” In short: tears of laughter and a smile of crying.
Want to know more about Ceylan? Click!