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“10 Days of a Curious Man” is a Turkish movie starring Nejat Isler. With Riza Kocaoglu, Kadir Çermik, Ilayda Akdogan, and Senay Gürler. It is directed by Uluç Bayraktar, and written by Damla Serim. Based on the novel by Mehmet Eroglu.

Our friend Sadık, played by the magnetic Nejat İşler, returns—seductive, resilient, and now, an aspiring novelist. You know, it’s a tough profession and quite challenging, so his quest for fresh narratives propels him into a new case, this time entwined with real estate speculation.

Plot Summary

Sadık is a seasoned man who has left behind the vices of drugs and alcohol. In an attempt to rebuild his life, he pens a novel that is dismissed for its lack of suspense. Determined to infuse some excitement into his existence, he starts investigating the disappearance of a woman, an online dancer, which leads him into the murky underworld of real estate speculation in Istanbul.

With “Winter Sleep,” Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan signaled a shift in style, increasing the importance of extended dialogues to the visually rich chamber pieces he plays out on grand stages. “The Wild Pear Tree” goes a step further, building elaborate rhetorical set pieces of such density that digesting them in all their intricacies at one sitting is practically impossible. Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue. For his fans, the three hours won’t feel like an indulgence, but those less sympathetic to the shared primacy of verbiage and imagery will likely feel tested. The achievement is masterful, though its diffusion will be limited.

Thematically “The Wild Pear Tree” fits perfectly into the director’s melancholy expanse of male disaffection, though his main character is younger than many of his protagonists,...