Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest work, The Wild Pear Tree (2018), adds to the memorable body of his films. The main characters are as perplexing as the minor ones. You cannot create character-types from them. They reveal only flashes of what they are, and often contradict, not themselves – but your idea and expectation of them.
This happens when a filmmaker does not revel in the shallow audacity of knowing (and re/presenting) his characters, but reveals his limitations, that he may not know them well. This leave space for aesthetic curiosity, but more crucially, it opens space for ethical imagination: the other is not to be consumed by knowledge, but to be imagined, looked for. This speculative journey into another person diverts the gaze from the violence of certainty.
And yet, it doesn’t prevent you from thinking and writing about the characters. They respond to situations with enough intensity to keep you interested and thoughtful. They speak with the simplicity and directness of speech, something that often gets distorted by the demands of fiction in cinema.
Ceylan’s characters are memorable precisely because they leave space between what they speak, and what they hold back. Ceylan is keenly aware of the incompatibility between speech and act. We don’t act the way we speak, and vice versa. Great cinema reveals that gap.
Ceylan is also a master of the landscape. The coastal Turkish town of Çanakkale merges with the characters and the mood of the film: its oak trees, its yellow-and-red cottonwood leaves, its small, winding roads and the lake that surrounds the town in the middle of receding hills, so reminiscent of Srinagar. There is a musical melancholy that connects the Turkish town with Srinagar. It reminds you of Orhan Pamuk’s invocation of “huzun”, the Turkish word of Arabic origin that denotes both anguish and hope.
Landscape is always Ceylan’s preferred backdrop, be it in Climates (2006) or Winter Sleep (2014), where the context of the film finds its mise en scène. The economic and political context – poverty, harsh governmental regulations, lives caught in endless loans and debts – is interspersed through the story, revealed either through conversation, or through social habitations. The political determines life’s borders, its folding dreams.
To pause on the characters, everyone is caught in their choices. Sinan is caught between a life of writing and a life of hardship, of a career in the classroom or in the riot police. He is awkward, timid and sentimental. He has read the literary masters. He has tried his hand in autobiographical fiction. He is audacious enough to irk established writers. Sinan is also the figure of Turkey’s unemployed youth, who are forced into a one-dimensional life.
Sinan’s father, Idris, once a promising teacher among the peasant class, is caught between a life of gambling and the family’s growing demands. Idris is the opposite of a bourgeois: he begs from his son, and dreams of fantastical projects like a well that will not yield water. Sinan’s mother, Asuman, married Idris for his way with words. Reduced to hardships by Idris’s gradual waywardness, Asuman is caught between words and reality, present and future.
The writer, Süleyman, who Sinan meets in a dream, is irritated by romantic sentimentality. He is caught between the madness of writing and the madness of social etiquette. Their conversation is a short treatise on the art of writing. After the clichés and the banalities are out of the way, Süleyman’s repeats the old adage: “writers must be able to take risks.”
Hazar Ergüçlü and Dogu Demirkol in The Wild Pear Tree. Photo: IMDB
Sinan also engages with apple-loving imams. They are caught in debates concerning theology. They too are confronted by a choice: between submission and interpretation. The dreamy woman, Hatice, appears only once, leaving you in waiting forever. She is caught between the life that is close and the life that is far, between rebellion and compromise, resigned to marry a jeweler, aware that there are “scorpions under that gold.”
Just like Yusuf, the poet in Semih Kaplanoğlu’s film, Yumurta/Egg (2007), you know Sinan, the writer, only through how he goes about life. The writer writes what the writer lives. Cinema cannot probe the dilemma of writing but the dilemma of the writer.
For background music, Ceylan uses Leopold Stokowski’s performance of Bach’s ‘Passacaglia’ in C minor, throughout the film. It flows like the slow movement of the camera. The film is ultimately about trying to make sense of life and its limited choices, grudgingly aware that the options are dictated from somewhere else. The one thought that lingered in my mind after the film ended, was something the Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, had written in Anathemas and Admirations (1986): “The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.”
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018).
