Synopsis
The Wild Pear Tree (Ahlat Ağacı, 2018) is a Turkish drama by Nuri Bilge Ceylan that you can watch online on iFILM — a three-hour Cannes Competition entry about a young man trying to publish his first book in a place that has no particular interest in books.
Sinan has just graduated and returned to his provincial hometown with a manuscript and no money. He makes the rounds: relatives, local officials, a celebrated writer, a girl he used to know. No one can help, or no one wants to. Whatever he scrapes together disappears into his father's gambling debts. Doğu Demirkol plays Sinan without softening the character's edges — he can be self-righteous, impatient, difficult — which makes the film considerably more honest than a story about a misunderstood artist usually manages to be. Murat Cemcir as the father, a schoolteacher who can't stop gambling, gives a performance that is somehow both comic and devastating.
Ceylan shoots in long takes across open countryside and small-town backstreets. The pace is slow enough that the film's actual subject — the strange, uncomfortable resemblance between Sinan and the father he can barely stand — only becomes clear gradually. The wild pear tree of the title grows where no one planted it and produces fruit no one asked for. Stream The Wild Pear Tree (2018) online on iFILM.
Starring
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