The Wild Pear Tree · reception & legacy
2018 · Nuri Bilge Ceylan
How The Wild Pear Tree has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It premiered in competition at Cannes 2018 to strong reviews but went home empty-handed — a snub many critics grumbled about, given Ceylan had won the Palme just four years earlier for Winter Sleep. Since then it's quietly climbed, with plenty of cinephiles now calling it his warmest and maybe his best film.
What's debated
The eternal Ceylan fight: are the marathon walk-and-talk debates — a village imam here, a jaded local novelist there — the whole glorious point, or is 188 minutes of people arguing self-indulgence?
Its footprint
Its footprint is mostly cinephile-internal: it's become shorthand for a certain kind of talk-heavy slow cinema, the film Letterboxd reviewers affectionately describe as 'three hours of a smug literature grad arguing with everyone he meets' — and mean it as praise.
Where it stands
A canon climber among slow-cinema devotees — frequently cited as one of 2018's best films and a favourite answer to 'which Ceylan should I start with... or end with'.