Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest – his first since 2014’s Winter Sleep – likens its men to wild pear trees: gnarled and stunted, but sturdy, able to withstand the harsh conditions of their environment. “If I were a dictator, I’d drop a fucking atomic bomb on this place,” snarls Sinan (Aydın Doğu Demirkol), a twentysomething graduate and aspiring writer who has returned to the rural village where he grew up. Jobless, friendless and avoiding his military service, he’s stuck helping his prankish, gambling-addicted father (Murat Cemcir) dig a well on the weekends. When he runs into former crush Hatice (Hazar Ergüçlü), he’s adamant that he won’t rot here, like her. Ceylan is clever to expose the quietly conservative attitudes of a certain type of liberal young man.
Yet for all Sinan’s misanthropy (and, it must be said, misogyny), the three-hour film is mostly tender towards its characters. The light is beautiful, their winding philosophical conversations romantic and rambling, with vast, wide shots playing out in real time as they saunter through rolling hills and along sun-dappled bridges. Leaves flutter with significance; no scene is hurried along. Sometimes this works: a woodland confrontation between Hatice and Sinan, for example, is sensuous and ripe with ideas. At other times the effect is exhausting: a circular conversation between Sinan and two imams seems to go on for ever.
