The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2018)

The Single-Tree and The Rope

Amir Siadat

The perspective of a single tree; beside it a figure seems to have been left inanimate, and a rope is hanging on the branches, which dances with the tune of the wind. Among the pictures with which The Wild Pear Tree is remembered, this one can be clearly taken from Kiarostami, and Ceylan from the very first steps, when he recreated behind the scenes of the Kasaba in the village of Clouds of May, he was clearly carrying impression form trilogy of koker. And as long as he was at the height of his maturity, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia framed the rides in the maze of the path, preferred the fringe to the movement in the main line, and gave a fundamental role to searching and act of asking, or in various forms emphasized on dual of death and life, he was still talking to his beloved Kiarostami. Now that the familiar single tree has been summoned with a different sense, in the middle of the Turkish filmmaker's last work, there must be a dialogue; the single tree that was the reminiscent of friendship, receptive nature, and lust for life in the films of Kiarostami, here is scary, horrifying, and the epitome of mortality. Kiarostami`s shadow is also can be found in subtile and probably unconscious indications. Hatice, before talking in private to Sinan, taking off his scarf and smoke, is one of those innocent village girls whose dreams do not go beyond the framework of the "marriage" and whose life is summed up in putting a jar on her head, and going towards the well; One like the newly bride in The Wind Will carry Us that milking the cow in the dark, and her shame and innocence made Forough (Iranian famous poet) sorrowful; One of those "perfect simple women." Idris, too, with his little joys and his "living in the moment" and "taking the world for nothing", is reminiscent of a Bagheri of Taste of Cherry, but where we see his motionless body hanging from the tree, like a table of feast for ants, it seems that this time life is too poisonous for a hopeless man to return to, for the sake of the sweetness of the fruit, even if this image is created by Sinan reflecting his will, and ruins when Idris wakes up. From the very beginning, it is clear that Sinan does not believe in the notion of life that people hold in Çanakkale. Hatice tells him about simple excuses to stay; “Good food, winds from the top of hills, ships disappearing on the horizon, soaking in the rain and summer sunset”. Sinan replies that he did not find anything appropriate in any of them; Perhaps because his mother agreed to marry his father, Idris, years ago on similar pretexts. In those days, Idris spoke of the "smell of the earth and the soil", the "beauty of the plains" and the "lambs", and with verbal magic created a "picture" of life in Çanakkale that seems too abstract today and does not fit into the numbness that has grounded his family.

Hatice's long shot, with her local costume surrounded by the yellowness of the trees, has abstractly embodied the mystery of ancient tales and the romantic manifestation of nature. The tighter frame has a dual quality: while Sinan is clearly in the center, Hatice, with a flushed face, stares from corner to outside the frame; One is realistic and devoid of fantasy, and the other is drowning in vague dreams; The first one has his foot on the hard ground and the second one wants to forget or deny the moment in order to reach the sky of illusion; One sees and one does not want to see. The dual design that is taken from the issue of "seeing" - from an aesthetic point of view - is an arena of opposition between the "idea", that wants the climate to be like a virgin, innocent, pristine and untouched, and a reality full of seams and conflicts. Ceylan is preoccupied with the gap between "idea" and "reality," as Kiarostami was. The difference is that Kiarostami tried to subtilize the reality in front of the camera and bring it as close to the idea as possible, and he did not hesitate to reveal the "arrangement" and "processing" of this "ideal" image by exposing the crew behind the scenes. The bitterness of his humor was that he implicitly noted that the pure human essence and the innocent nature, which we watch with envy and want to drown in it, were formed in front of the camera. He showed that we need cinema - not necessarily - to reconstruct the outside world as it is, sometimes to detach ourselves from this world or to fabricate it and create another world; A vibrant and lively world in which one can breathe joyfully; Similar to the descriptions of Idris or Hatice of Çanakkale. But something inside us says that Sinan is right. There is a fundamental difference between an artist who, with the help of his materials, tries to idealize a marginal realm from the "outside", with someone who decays "inside" the same realm. The aesthetic tricks of the former one has nothing to do with the self-deception of the latter one. Idris spent a lifetime entertaining himself with the thought of reaching water from a dry well and did not want to see this "soil" is no longer fertilized, but for Hatice, who probably could not rebel and her only choice is to give in to a compulsory marriage, is there anything left, other than making herself "satisfied" by idealizing nature and village life? When Sinan says that he does not want to "rot here", Hatice gets upset for a moment: "So we who stay here rot?"; Who does not know that her distress is a sign of affirmation of Sinan's words? The poor girl knows well that the house she is waiting for is not of "fortune"; It is a "treasure" under which a "scorpion" is sleeping. Hatice is ashamed of her situation and regrets for things she has not done. The girl with a jar on her head in the field has been banished from the paradise of simplicity and reached self-awareness; She can no longer be one of those "perfect simple women." She can no longer be envied for her calm and small realm, because behind that calmness and smallness, lies a turbulent sea. From this point of view, that fleeting and luscious mischief - which the wind howls from its bursts of energy and the leaves twist together - shows more of a thirst for "experiencing" and "trying out" than of long-standing affections; It is an instant and slippery pleasure that the maiden in the story will keep as a sweet memory and a small portion of happiness in her heart; It comes to an end abruptly and in the eternal captivity of "manners" and "norms" she must deal with its absence. This land is an arena of continuity and repetition; Experience has no place in here.

We do agree with Sinan because we have seen in a stingy, boring and old-fashioned climate, people's lives are either wasted with vain efforts and false hopes, or on TV, or over lengthy futile debates, or waiting for the retirement bonus or at the gambling table. Will Sinan's future be but any of these? What is the function of a long pause on that three-person dispute between Sinan, Nazmi and Haj veysel, if not a show of futility? Specially from a camera’s view that knows how to summarize the entire Sinan military period in landing a boot on the ice! Besides, isn't the synchronization of this camera with the wanderings of this three people, walking in the alleys, and finally standing up and watching the path from a distance, drawing a relation between that fruitless controversy and place? Maybe it's the men behind the camera who persuade us to sympathize with Sinan. One of them (Akin Aksu) lived and wrote Sinan, and the other (Ceylan), despite coming from the "margin" to the "text" (or, more explicitly, "has become globalized"), knows the remnants as evidenced by his record, and he has often narrated the limbo-like situation of people between staying and leaving. Staying and leaving, which has a tangible connection with the dilemma of a society in transition in Turkey: choosing a traditional livelihood and following in the footsteps of ancestors, or, conversely, welcoming changes and embracing new ways. This is how in Ceylan's works "Self" of the people who are tired of their situation and think of fleeing (from the rural youth of Kasaba or Distant who are engaged in migration to the Hacer of Three Monkeys who seeks salvation somewhere outside the house) go beyond their individuality to create the portrait of a larger social self. It seems that Sinan is Turkey itself. He wants to grow and join the wider and more progressive world; Writes to be accepted; But he does not. He can not. There is no future waiting for him outside of Çanakkale, but nothing connects him to the past either. He has a problem with all the manifestations of the past; With his father, with his fatherland, and perhaps - most of all - with Suleyman, a writer from the same land, whose voice is heard a little farther. He believes If a voice has an audience, it must have disregarded the right of someone like him! So, in that short meeting, he crushes all his disgust with the poisonous words and irony onto Suleyman's head and his pride. Sinan sneers when her mother discusses Idris's past dealings with "gentlemen" such as "teachers" and "professors" ("you believe these are gentlemen?"). He tells his mother that he is single because he is "poor", "unemployed" and "rural". In his daily wanderings, he seems adrift, indifferent and isolated from the environment, and the frame in frames enter the film processing to narrow the field for him. Sinan is a storehouse of hatred and humiliation. His hatred of his homeland and people is so great that somewhere he says he wishes to drop an atomic bomb on the land of his ancestors and destroy it. He assumes that if the processes of becoming a writer or teacher fails, he will be recruited by the police, like his friend. As this friend says, suppressed anger can be poured on the insurgents. Where does this growing disgust come from? Is Idris the cause of all the shortcomings, as Sinan claims? Can we say the son's issue is that he does not approve of the father at all and does not get along with him? And if so, should Sinan's reconsideration of the only audience of his book and the final concurrence of father and son be considered more or less a happy ending? Despite the film's emphasis on intergenerational relationships and the importance of the "father" icon, themes such as continuity and repetition do not have a strong or direct relationship with patriarchal relations. Idriss, in an all-encompassing and humorous way, is an anti-typical example of the tyrannical fathers we remember in similar climates (The most exemplary of them is Padre Padrone by the Taviani brothers). Aside from being too democrat as a father (welcomes Sinan's criticism: "Progress means this"), he has a teenage demeanor that appears‌ in his constant preoccupation with playing (whether in the café or at home, when he tries to joke and mischief) or where he asks Sinan for pocket money. At the same time, we have seen at least twice that Sinan's judgment about him was wrong (in a scene at café he imagines a group of "fool people " around his father) or far from fairness (Where he thinks Idris fills out the betting form at the class). No! Idris is not the problem. There are often more formidable forces in the nature of this land that swallow father and son together. Here the antagonist is the land itself, where the essence of fairy tales can be seen in its depths: like the court of forest witches, it enchants travelers from "far away" to take and eat them (If Hatice's unexpected presence is like a glorious moment in the myths, it is because the maiden is looking for a savior). Ceylan does not want the "imagination" that Kiarostami portrayed. Although he starts from somewhere in the landscape of Kiarostami finally addresses an opposite landscape. He is determined to leave the stain on "pleasing scenery" and the "simplicity of small realms"; The lanscapes that the people, who are frustrated of modern life, enviously ask for. The perspectives from his (and Sinan's) point of view contain a kind of terrifying beauty that is related to decay, and the darker aspects of reality are more suffocating than can be tolerated by relying on romantic fantasies. The seasons, with frightening glory and beauty, come and go, and the chain of destiny connects the new generation to the previous lost generation, and turns people into the past and the future of each other. It is as if that single tree, like the focal point of the world, has split it in two; It’s our decision which way to turn heads; either look from the above at that heavenly geography of Koker, or the hell of Çanakkale. With these descriptions, the end of the film, no matter how we look at it (whether it is the embodiment of human endeavor and will or indicates the predominance of environment and determinism of geography), is not a happy ending. That pickaxing can be considered a dark metaphor of Sinan's condition that he has no choice but to stay, to struggle for nothing and to sink with every movement. An optimistic view can be "reconciliation between father and son" and their reaching a mutual understanding, but Sinan’s taking action, right after the father finally comes to the conclusion that others are right and no water comes from the well, seems ironic. The result of this reconciliation is probably the confrontation we first saw between Idris and grandfather: the father says he has searched and have not found anything, and son works in vain. In this father and son, something from the myth of Sisyphus is buried: while the raw and uninformed Sinan stands at the beginning of the path and the subject is serious to him, Idris, carefree and happy go lucky, has gone most of the way and has long since come to terms with the endless game of rock rolls from the summit. Perhaps this father - who has a "philosophy" of his own - along with the son who followed in his footsteps and is committed to the revival of nature, shows the parody and hopeless manifestations of another father and son that three decades ago a little further, vowed to water the dry single tree every day, hoping that one day it would eventually bloom. Even if there is no such hint, it is undeniable that Ceylan, from the sequence of alderman's daughter appearing with a tea tray to the last scene of The Wild Pear Tree, has alternately returned to the lessons of Andrei Tarkovsky by addressing the scene on the border of reality and delusion. In spite of such a slight border, what difference does it make whether the hanging Sinan is a reality or an illusion? Or if it is an illusion, what is the difference between being an illusion of the father or the son? Basically, what is this illusion but a translation for the "unification" of the two? If the green of the olive groves in Kiarostami`s film was the color of dream, here we are faced with a cruel and naked reality that is imbued with nightmares or is the nightmares per se; A nightmare that remains, even when Idris wakes up and it can never be escaped: The father stands at the wellhead to watch his youth. Perhaps his posture in front of the boy is like a mirror that becomes clearer with each blow of the pickaxe, without falling.