The Pear Tree

Mahmoud is a well known writer. He has been unable to write for a long time; he sits at the desk and nothing comes. He goes to the garden house outside Tehran. There the gardener comes with a problem: the pear tree has borne no fruit this year and nobody knows why. While Mahmoud attends to the tree he goes back to his childhood. There is a summer in the same garden, under the same tree: the days he spent with his cousin M. and the thing he never said. Dariush Mehrjui directs. Homayoun Ershadi plays Mahmoud and Golshifteh Farahani plays his cousin M. The source is a story by Goli Taraghi. It is Golshifteh Farahani's first film; she was fourteen at the time. The structure runs on two times and the transitions are given without explanation; the garden is the same in both. The matter it works at is not the inability to write but the selectiveness of memory; the narrative shows the past not as it was but as far as the character can carry it. The tree is used as a figure and the film does not hide it; what the gardener proposes for the tree is open to reading. Mehrjui's visual work is calm; the camera mostly stays still and the garden is shown in long takes. It was shown in Iran and at international festivals. Who it is for: viewers who like Iranian cinema and literary adaptation. Who it is not for: the pace is very slow, almost nothing happens, and the narrative proceeds in inner voice.