"Wild Pear Tree" is 3 hours long, and when I read it, it feels like reading a novel, and the scene in the jungle can almost be ranked at the top of my favorite scene. After going over and over again, this film review written by Jonathan Romney of "Film Review" is the most accurate and shared with everyone.
It is difficult for a good filmmaker to write a good novel. For directors with ambitions to write novels, a more sensible approach is to use the language of film and write novels on screen. The notion of a "fiction" film may be out of place, but this attempt gives the film a literary quality that transcends the audiovisual language itself.
Ceylon's "Wild Pear Tree" is a very controversial novel film. After winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 for "Hibernation", Ceylon considers "The Wild Pear Tree" a great work.
"Wild Pear Tree" ambitiously discusses very important topics in 3 hours: the role of the artist in contemporary society, the feedback and struggle of creative career, the devaluation of literature and education, the conflict between youth and experience, contemporary Turkey and Islam The conflict between religion and secularism. The whole film has always maintained a serious and heavy tone, sometimes full of conflict outbreaks.
Like its predecessor, "Hibernation," "The Wild Pear Tree" is an intimidating film, which is to say, it could be a great one. The Wild Pear Tree falls into a particularly thin film category, the Palme d'Or, or the "Awesome" category. Also in this category is Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon.
Like Haneke's film, "The Wild Pear Tree" attempts to solve a contemporary conundrum by asking the audience to watch it in a cinematic way, while at the same time abandoning all languid daily viewing habits. Both films exude a strong confidence of intelligence and moral seriousness: they are less like movies and more like novels that have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What Ceylon shows is not arrogance or conceit, his attention to major issues is completely sincere, and artistic arrogance is one of the themes of his films. Like the weary middle-aged historical dramatist protagonist in "Hibernation," "Wild Pear Tree" is about a man with literary dreams that may be completely unrealistic, even futile.
Sinan is a young man fresh out of university destined for a teaching job in eastern Turkey, which he sees as the death of his soul. What he really cared about was writing. In the movie, he has been trying to raise money for the publication of his novel. This novel happens to be called The Wild Pear Tree.
Sinan repeatedly reiterates in several scenes that this is a work of social observation that is free of "any belief, ideology, and allegiance", that it contains personal confessions, and that it is "a peculiar autobiographical fictional superfiction" .
Audiences can learn a lot from Sinan's self-reporting and the language he can't help demeaning others about the novel The Wild Pear Tree, but the other actors have also revealed a lot.
Much of the film focuses on Sinan wandering around his hometown of Çan and the surrounding countryside, as well as the strange sights of his university town, Çanakkale. The way The Wild Pear Tree is told is unique: the entire film is largely structured by dialogues between Sinan and various people whose attitudes measure the limited understanding of the world as a whole by the young Sinan.
One of them is the mayor. Sinan tries to get the financial sponsorship needed for publication from the mayor, but the mayor educates him about responsibility and reality, and Sinan returns empty-handed. The other is a local self-made sand supplier and arts patron, who arrogantly gives Sinan a rhetoric about a college education in the film, telling him that most of the college-going people around him die. That's exactly what happened to Sinan's father, a charming but mediocre teacher and a local gambler of fame.
Sinan met a successful local novelist in a bookstore. Sinan follows the literati around town, constantly criticizing him and other writers for their lack of the fantasy idealism they possess, then summoning the courage to ask them to read the first draft of his novel.
In other scenes, Ceylon gives the image more say. Sinan meets the girl Hatice in the jungle. Her hijab and field attire show that she is a kind local Islamic girl. She doesn't seem interested in the urban lifestyle Sinan describes, but she is willing to unleash her charms in his company.
The girl and Sinan lit a cigarette and slowly took off their headscarves, their jet-black hair floating in the wind like water plants. Hatice is about to marry a jeweler, and when the wind blows, she kisses Sinan. The camera floats around them like wandering spirits, and the film enters a carnival of images at this moment.
The camera sometimes erupts into an even more destructive force. In a scene near the end of the movie, where a dog jumps into the ocean, we see a nightmare from Idris' childhood. By the end of the film, Ceylon uses two separate shots to portray the alternative possibilities of life, self-destructive despair and existential and artistic perseverance.
There's a totally comedic scene in the film, a shot that echoes One of Ceylon's best films, Far Away. Sinan accidentally destroys a historic Çanakkale bridge, and he quickly flees the crime scene and hides in what appears to be a local monument commemorating the Trojan horse.
Ceylon associates allusions to the Hollywood myth with ideas of low and high culture. He showed his disdain for Hollywood in the form of a TV series, while keeping pictures of Camus in Sinan's cupboards and showing Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez on the walls of a second-hand bookstore Portrait of et al. But does anyone still care about literature? Will Sinan's book change the world? Maybe it's not even known if he can change his own life a little bit.
Ceylon has been very concerned with literature for a long time. The ironic tone of Ceylon, influenced by Chekhov, has become particularly evident since the masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor." "Hibernation" and new work "Wild Pear Tree" reveal Ceylon's passion for cinema. "The Wild Pear Tree" is more of an important novel than a great movie.
In film, the status of language and image is not static. The two films "Happy Lazaro" and "Burning" at the Cannes Film Festival also reached the depth of the novel through images, sounds and complex narratives. In contrast, "Wild Pear Tree" is more substantial, elegant, deep, and charming.
The only way to properly digest the movie is to open the movie at home and keep replaying it forward if necessary, with the script in one hand and the notebook in the other. It's hard to understand the dialogue just by watching it once.
The original translation was published on the public account: Yuki Chiho
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