User reviews

I felt every minute of this very long Turkish film.

Long because it's, well, long (clocking in at just over three hours). But also long because the main character, who's in virtually every frame of the movie, is such an unpleasant person to hang out with. And part of the reason that he's so unpleasant is that he's recognizable, as I've been that person myself. He's young, fresh out of college, and thinks he knows everything there is to know about life despite having almost no experience of it himself. He's cocky, condescending, and unbearable. What ultimately makes him worth spending time with, and for that matter makes the whole movie worth sticking with, is the final scene, in which he comes to understand that the father who he's shunned because of all the life mistakes he's so determined not to make himself is perhaps the one person in his life who most understands him and most emulates the ideals the son goes around shoving down everyone's throat.

This is the kind of movie I wish I had seen with someone else so I could have someone to talk about it with. Throughout the film, the protagonist has little moments of.....I'm not sure what to call them.....daydreams? hallucinations? A scene will play out one way, and the it will abruptly shift gears and play out another, leading us to believe that the first version was in the protagonist's head. I'm not sure what to make of these breaks from reality. He's written a book that he's trying to get published, so maybe these episodes are a glimpse into how events play out in his book rather than how they did in reality? Or maybe it's the reverse. Maybe the movie we're watching is the book he wrote, and these moments are what actually happened. Or maybe it's neither and I'm overthinking. Maybe he's just a writer who is always attuned to alternative paths a person's narrative might take.

The ending didn't exactly make me feel like all of the three hours preceding it were necessarily worth it. I don't know why the movie had to be quite so long. But it did linger in my head and it's made the whole movie grow in stature for me when I think back on it. I don't know that I'd want to watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it once.

Grade: A

The wind rises as Sinan and Hatice kiss at a spring on the outskirts of the forest. It is the threshold of many things, not merely the forest. A few steps in the right direction will lead to love and the fulfillment of dreams. The wrong steps invite heartbreak and the crushing weight of societal expectations. Which way to go?! While Sinan inspires Hatice to let her hair down, a big step in Turkey, he can't seem to help himself. The gambling addiction, fawning desire to please and wild schemes of his father are not where Sinan wants to go, yet understanding his father is the key to understanding himself, for better or worse. Wild pears are isolated misfits, and so are father and son.

This witty and beautiful film is full of metaphors, wonderful imagery and deep, intriguing conversations. The film revolves around many interesting themes. Among these themes is that ruptures in the soul should be treated with joy and patience for they help us discover who we are. The cinematography is luminous, mesmerizing and far ranging from lamp lit streets at night, rainfall and close-ups of Hatice's flowing hair. I want to linger in each place. It is a long film, but for what it reveals about contemporary Turkish society and human nature, it is a fantastic bargain and worth the price. From the director of Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Seen at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.

Is it possible to feel the same things with somebody struggling to build his own life, the difficulties he faces to be free from his parents' expectations or oppressions, to realize that they are not his supporters but his obstacles?.maybe a part of it, yes the duration of the film may be longer than the standards (who determines them?) at the end i felt that every scene was necessary to get closer to Sinan's feelings. Asuman who watches a Yilmaz Guney's film, the mother slapping his son's face scene in that film, maybe inspired her to make "why you didn't get the money from him" conversation with her own son or the imams and Sinan's debate about faith, the famous writer's and Sinan dialogue then conflict..even the scene about the tight budget of the lottery salesman maybe reminded Sinan his father's situation. I feel very lucky to watch this film in its original language and I'm still digesting it but as soon as the film ended, i felt like Idris, Asuman, Sinan and all other people around him are still living there, in that town Çan!

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is arguably the best director Turkey has ever seen and Ahlat Agaci is definitely one of the best films in recent years that has been made by Turkish directors.

The plot, the acting and the cinematography is simply incredible. As a guy who lives in Turkey, it's very rare to see films with a quality. So in that way, I can easily say that Ahlat Agaci is the best movie in the past 4-5 years.

What stood out for me in the film was that you basically never get bored even though the film is quite long. No unnecessary scenes, no characters that you hate everytime you see them. Definitely a thing to consider.

NBC is so undervalued and underrated, at least in his homecountry. Interestingly enough, European cinema appreciates him and he almost always participates in Cannes Film Festival, but I'm %100 sure that half of Turkey doesn't even know his name. It's sad, but it also says a lot about the general look to cinema sector in Turkey.

Thanks to people like NBC, though, we can watch 'real' and 'non-American made' films.

Quality film by an incredible director. 10/10

Watching Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film 'Ahlat Agaci' ('The Wild Pear Tree') is a cinematic experience that I would compare to reading some of the books of the classics of Russian literature. It's not easy reading, but it's catchy. The length of the books or of the movie exceeds the average, but as a viewer you do not feel the passage of time, because the writers or the film director in this case absorb you in their worlds. As in Chekhov, the characters of Ceylan's film live in a provincial city and the adjoining village, in a socially suffocating atmosphere and are surrounded by a human landscape composed of people unable to understand their intellectual aspirations. The Russian books (Tolstoy's for example) and Ceylan's films contain philosophical or historical diversions that give them an universal and perennial content that crosses the boundaries of geography and time.

Sinan Karasu is a young man who returns to his city and to his non-functional family after graduating college. The prospects of a college graduate are not too many or too attractive: either to take a teacher's exam after which he will be assigned to teach at a primary school in a remote area of Turkey, or join the army or the police. His father, Idris, is a teacher, but also a betting addict, which got him into debts, and led the family to losing the property of their house and living at the edge of a precarious existence. Idris's ambition seems to be to return to his native village, where in weekends he digs a fountain on a hillside, with little hope of ever hitting water. Young Sinan is also a writer, he wrote a book inspired by the local people and culture, but the kind of non-commercial book that finds neither editor nor reader public. The gaps between his aspirations and realities, between his ambitions and the mediocrity around are huge, and the result is a permanent conflict with a world with which he tries to entertain dialogues, but which he also approaches with a sense of intellectual superiority without foundation in social realities.

Like many other good movies (or books or other works of art), 'Ahlat Agaci' can be viewed and understood at several levels. At the personal level, the film has complex characters that we discover and we get to know better and better as we advance in the viewing, with the help the excellent acting performances of actors such as Dogu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir and Bennu Yildirimlar . There is also a political and social layer that is never explicit, maybe in order to allow the film to be easily distributed in Turkey and thus be accessible to the local audience, which is probably very important for a director like Nuri Bilge Ceylan, but also because true creators know how to convey messages without transforming their works into manifestos. Finally, there is a philosophical layer, more or less related to the main story, but which raises interesting issues such as the compromises that a writer is bound to make to gain popularity and what are their limits, or the relationship between religion and its institutions and their relevance in social life. Ceylan knows to tell a story and to film beautifully, and attentive viewers will also benefit from short moments of surreal insertions that deserve not to be missed. The film is long but in rare moments it feels so (the scene of the conversation with the two imams is the only one in which I had the impression that the cutting of a few minutes would have been beneficial), and the spectators will be rewarded at the end with one of the most exciting film finales which I have seen lately. A movie to see.

The film depicted a cliche plot of life that happen everywhere in the world that nobody in hollywood would ever produce. it's a loser story, something that might not be "inspiring", "uplifting", and just plain depressing and plays at key minor at an instrument (even tho there's some note changes at the end). it's a taboo song that people often treat as a myth. it's like discovering Bicycle Thieves and Mouchette once again.

It has been 21 years since Ceylan shot his first feature film Kasaba, whose main theme was an intellectual young man's desperate, family-stuck life in the countryside with no way out. After this film throughout his film career he focused on different themes as well of course, from middle class criticism (Climates) to film noir (Three Monkeys). But, being from Turkey, eventually in his last movies he returned to the countryside tales again. Especially this movie, The Wild Pear Tree, seemed to me as if Ceylan suffered from a partial amnesia and forgot that he shot the movie Kasaba. So he blended this "brand new film idea" with his recently developed film aesthetics and here we have The Wild Pear Tree.

In his first movies Ceylan barely had a story, he only had "themes". The rest of the movie was wonderful photography and this is what he got famous for. Then, founding clever collaborations, he learnt how to tell stories as well. But the question here is: does he really have a new story to tell? Turkey has changed a lot since Kasaba, but Ceylan's representations look like they are here to stay eternally. For instance, while Ceylan still hold on to the "intellectual stuck in the countryside" stereotype, intellectuals in the Turkish countryside either made it to the metropolises or they are replaced/outdated by the emerging religious elite.

So instead of telling a new story, Ceylan seems like he chose to "garnish" what he already has, with neverending dialogues unattached to each other. Dialogue with the girl, dialogue with the mayor, with the businessman, with the writer, with the police friend, with the imams and with this and this and this. Kind of a video game, one "countryside monster" at a time. So I think this movie is a rococo remake of minimalist Kasaba.

So if you tolerate the theatrical lines in the first dialogues, the movie is a nice one to see. But in comparison to the last 2 movies of Ceylan, this is certainly a step backwards (and surprisingly, this backwardness is evident also in the photography).

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylon has an amazing ability to transform the most ordinary, banal human incidents into significant events. This, coupled with the similar ability to capture the beauty of perfectly ordinary places on earth, makes this an extremely pleasurable viewing experience. In The Wild Pear Tree you enter the world of Sinan Karasu, a young man recently graduated from the university as a teacher but with goals to be a writer. Much of the movie involves him finding sponsors or the means to publish his work. His frustration is of a writer trying to find a publisher for his book, someone who has greater awareness and ambitions, but is trapped in a very provincial, very small village. At one point in his search to find a sponsor he is told by another author, paraphrasing, "describing the banal enriches it, because nothing is as ordinary as it seems." This is the theme of this movie.

It is a long movie, running over three hours. The movie doesn't change camera every five seconds and there is no "action" to wake the audience up. The stunning beauty of ordinary people, in ordinary places, going through ordinary life experiences, is engrossing, and very much recommended.

What I expected today was to watch a standard NBC film with good photography, long dialogues, etc. However, this time NBC fails to make a good film compared to his recent films such as Winter Sleep, Three Monkeys and Distant. Wild Pear Tree is far from achieving an articulate scenario; suffering from usual-acting-quality, incomplete characters, not-so-relevant-music-score... Dialogues are too difficult to follow; not only the actors mumble the words but also the sentences are sometimes too weak to give a meaning to. Pity for all the effort but still hopeful for the next films by NBC.

I remember very well the night I watched Winter Sleep in cinema. The movie was 3+ hrs and once it finished, I didn't notice at all we have spent 3 hrs watching. I could easily go more. That night experience is one the sweetest experiences that I ever had with Cinema. I was hoping to repeat the same experience and damn it again happened. The movie is story of a graduated guy that returns to his village. He wants to be writer. He has a once respected but now gambler father that is the reason of shame for him. He hates the village and all the people there. He wishes even to destroy there. The movie is the story of relationship of a son and father. Father as symbol of identity of the son. The feeling of moving on from your own identity and yet sill being stuck in it. Sinan hates his father but at the same time pities him. He wishes he could move on. At the end of movie Sinan realizes that the father is the wisest and sees himself in father. The father is the wild pear tree and so the Sinan. Bilge Ceylan was photographer and you can find amazing pictures in his movie. The scene that is taken from high and they are driving the truck in snow is amazing. The movie has some masterpiece scenes such as Sinan encounter with Hatice. The way their chat goes and twists to a erotic end, mix with the winds that splashes Hatice hair is so well made.

This film is better than "Town", "Three Monkeys" and "Climates" but not as well as others. There is a lot of didactic dialogue in the film. As if the director imitated the dialogue of novice writers. Because the main character is a beginner writer. Even if it really is the goal, it is still bad.

Turkish master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's follow-up to his superb WINTER SLEEP is another intimate epic. Again, over 3 hours long, but, focused on a writer, Sinan. The writer here is a young college graduate determined to not only publish his first novel, but, also to break free from his father, Idris - a teacher who also had wild ambition, but, never succeeded. While the story is simple, Ceylan plunges at length into his characters. A couple of sequences truly stand out: First, is an accidental meeting with a young woman the writer once had his eye one, but, who is now headed, unenthusiastically, into a marriage. The scene plays out in 'real time'. Long past the point where a conventional movie would have moved on. At first it draws the viewer in, and, later, makes one feel almost uncomfortable. As if intruding on a private moment. Even more awkward is a long sequence where Sinan meets a successful local author. They engage. Then spar. Then quarrel. All of the audaciousness and frustrations of Sinan play out over the extended scenes. Despite the tight nature of the plot, Ceylan isn't a 'drawing room' type of filmmaker. He uses the vast Turkish landscape as a means of showing how small a man can be against such a harsh environment. As I noted: an intimate epic. In the end, WILD PEAR TREE doesn't work as well as a WINTER SLEEP, or his masterwork, ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. The central character isn't quite interesting enough to carry the length of the movie. And, the relationship arc with the father is rather easy to discern long before the half-way point. PEAR isn't a movie for the casual filmgoer. But, it is one to savor should one want to plunge themselves into this world - like diving into a densely detailed novel.

So, it goes like this. A guy walks for a long time, then talks to someone for half an hour. You think it's important and try to follow, but the acting is too level all the way and the dialogue overly pretentious so it gets too boring and you go the toilet or have some tea. When you return, the characters are still talking, but it doesn't look like you've missed much. When the scene is finally over you find out that the director just dropped this plot line as it leads to nowhere, and it's okay you didn't see half of it. Then the main character walks again for a long time, finally finds someone else to talk to and the story repeats. They talk, then the subject is dropped completely and the guy he talked to never appears again. Then he walks again... You get it. And after 3 hours the movie just ends.

Perfect acting, funny dialogues, slow but intense. I could have continued to watch for 3 more hours.

The main character has a very rich and interesting personality, as well as the other characters that surround him. The cinematography is amazing as usual but some of the weird things that happen during the moving shots make them far less impressive than the glorious still shots.

It's very easy to find things from your own life within the story and the dialogues that occur which makes a lot of the little-longer-than-usual scenes very engaging and that makes you wonder how the dialogue is gonna develop and conclude.

I normally don't care too much about the length of movies but I'm a little bit on the negative side with this one. That's mainly because of what I told myself halfway through the movie which was; "Ohhh, we're only halfway" instead of "Yeahhh, we're only halfway".

It's about a young writer who recently finished university. He must move back to his village from the city where he went to school. So his struggles start as he doesn't want to get used to the village life.

No movie ever made in India can portray life of lower middle class in such wonderful manner.

Movie is made in Turkey but you can just change the name, dub it in Hindi, don't change a single word in the movie just exact translation and it would not give you a single moment that wont identify with a lower middle class life.

There is no acting in the movie, its almost like live streaming of a normal real family life. Its so wonderfully made that 3 hours went by like 3 minute for me, despite the fact that movie is slow paced and dialogues are just routing conversations.

If you watch it you would see how small things that happen everyday when put together over a period of time become so profound and precious that they seem more enlightening than all the literature in the world put together.

Imperfections of life and brutalities of reality that we live every single day without complaining and without knowing how just one kindness of fate would have changed everything for us.

Lower middle class life is such magical space where just one good day can change everything for you as you are just striving to move just one step ahead to make life better for you, that day does not come for 95% of the people on earth but its worth waiting and hoping for that day, sometimes generations wait for it and it never comes but hope never dies.

The Wild Pear Tree is Nuri Ceylan's most recent long, compelling character study of a newly graduated student struggling to publish his supposedly unique book about life living in Canakkale. The movie can be said to be the sum of Sinan's interactions with various people throughout the film, including his father who has a gambling addiction, his mother and sister who don't seem overly supportive of him, his apparent love interest, various publishers, religious imams and public figures, and of course other famous writers. The move is very dialogue driven, but it is also not at the same time, given its long runtime, there are also many scenes of simple quietness, and mere great cinematography. However, at times, it feels as though Ceylan has dragged it too far. He appears to have gotten too comfortable in the Director's seat and it feels as though some dialogue scenes and some scenes showcasing amazing cinematography are too long. The plot, or at least the main background story following the move along, also does not feel as compelling as his previous film Winter Sleep. Overall, the movie is great, but also tends to drag a bit. In his previous film Winter Sleep, I think Ceylan got the balance right for achieving the classification 'masterpiece.' However, in the Wild Pear Tree, it is merely a good movie with its flaws, and the main flaw anyone will feel coming out of the film is some of the unnecessary runtime.

Occasionally, movies focus on a person who worries that they're becoming their parents, in the sense of doing the things that were once considered uncool. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Ahlat Agaci" addresses this, but goes so deep into it that it's almost as if you have to see the movie ahead of time to understand it (a catch-22). The movie gives an unflattering portrayal of modern Turkey, with the protagonist moving from one unpleasant sight to another, finally confronting his parents.

I don't know that I would call it a masterpiece, but still worth seeing.

Make sure that after you watched this movie, you feel like finishing a novel.

This was the first time I have seen a Turkish movie. Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a great and prolific director. He is a thinker. Watching his movie was almost like reading Russian novels by Dostoyevsky, or Turgenev, or Chekov. I think Nuri is heavily influenced by Russian literature. I liked the landscape of this film. However I have a few issues with this film: 1) the heavy and lengthy philosophical discussions with another writer and with his friends were totally irrelevant to the movie. 2) I don't like his treatment of youth. The 22 years old young man thinks, acts, behaviors, and depresses like a 60 years old man, without any liveliness and innocence. I especially hate to see the last scene the son was contemplating about hanging himself. There were not many reasons behind such a thought. His father had the reasons to hang himself, but not the son. 3) The story was very thin, tempo was very slow, and it became boring to watch. However, I think I would love to watch the other movies by Nuri in the future.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan challenge himself in every movie he make. He is in the top 5 directors living. Wild pear tree is one of masterpiece in 2018. Every cinema lover must see.

It's a three-hour search for meaning in life in modern times in Can and Canakkale, in far western Turkey. It follows a recent male college graduate returning home to a family slowly disintegrating because of the father's gambling problem.

Sinan Karasu (Dogu Demirkol) is a recent college graduate at loose ends. He is considering a school teaching career. His father, Idris (Murat Cemcir), was once a respected school teacher but is addicted to gambling, putting the family's future in doubt. Sinan's mother, Asuman (Bennu Yildirimlar), and sister, Yasemin (Asena Keskinci), are ambivalent about Idris. Sinan's grandfather (Tamer Levent) is a respected but retired imam.

Idris dreamed of raising sheep in the hills above his grandfather's house. Sinan wants to have a manuscript he's written containing observations on local culture, including his family, published but struggles to find the means to do so. Along the way, he has lengthy conversations with a thriving local author, Süleyman (Serkan Keskin), and two young imams (Ahmet Rifat Sungar and Öner Erkan). His discussions are unempathetic and cynical. By the film's end, he has circled back to the beginning of his quest, perhaps a little wiser, but may not.

"The Wild Pear Tree" is longwinded on culture, the nature of faith, and relationships. Sinan's character is very unlikeable. The cinematography is lovely, but I found the movie endless and without a destination. The sense that Sinan reflected something of me at his age was also an unhappy problem for me.

I don't understand the high praise for the film.

Three hours of boring and sometimes totally unnecessary dialogues interweaved with very pretentious photography and a somehow poor plot make of this movie one of my worst watching choices. The conversations are often leading to no real point and the storytelling is halting and slow. If you are not a very big fan of the genre and not particularly close to the thematics, spare your time for something more pleasant to endure, such as being stuck in a traffic jam or the line at the post office.