Climates

Climates – In 2006, the great Turkish film maker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, ventured a foray into Ingmar Bergman territory with Climates, a morose study of a failing long-term relationship. Isa is an instructor in Istanbul. Apparently, he teaches architecture or, perhaps, a course in archaeology. With his girlfriend, Bahar, he explores Greek ruins near the city of Kas. From a hilltop, Bahar sees Isa stumble and fall between two great Corinthian columns and, then, suddenly realizes that their relationship has failed. At dinner with married friends, they get into an ugly spat. Isa’ s neck is bothering him and he has to sleep with his head in a drawer extracted from the night-stand in the hotel next to the bed. On the beach, he ends the affair with Bahar. She puts her hands over his eyes as they are riding a motorcycle back from the beach and they have a minor accident. Bahar goes back to Istanbul alone, telling Isa not to call her. Four months later, Isa is involved with an old flame Serap – he stalks her, talks his way into her house, and, then, violently rapes her, although it seems that she is playing along with him. Longing for Bahar, Isa flies to Agn province, the place where Mount Ararat is located, and courts Bahar. (She is working on a TV series, a melodrama set among the Kurds – she is an art director). Isa pleads with Bahar and says that he wants to marry her. She rejects him, but in the middle of the night, shows up at his cheap hotel room. In the morning, it seems that she is ready to quit her job and fly back to Istanbul to marry Isa. But, having accomplished her conquest, the fickle Isa callously rejects her again. She returns to the film location where shooting has to be stopped because of a lowflying plane jetting through the perpetually snowy skies above a graveyard where the TV series is being filmed. The plane, of course, contains Isa returning to Istanbul alone. The film is primarily a portrait of the feckless and self-absorbed Isa, played by Nuri Ceylan, the director, himself. Isa is an aimless intellectual – he can’t quite get his thesis on Turkish ruins written and, after promising a photograph of some ruins to his cabdriver, he takes the kid’s address and, then, just throws it away. Isa looks sad all the time and has big, mournful eyes, but he’s not trustworthy – when he breaks up with Bahar he tells her that it’s for her own good and, when pleading for her to take him back, he begins their new relationship with a lie, denying that he has been with Serap. Ceylan fearlessly portrays his alter-ego, as deceitful, manipulative, and weak. Isa’s plan to win back Bahar is based on a casual conversation with his parents with whom he has almost no connection – his mother had admonished him to produce for them a grandchild. Ceylan uses very long takes and, often, sequence shots which are enlivened by his brilliant sense of composition and stunning camera placement. In interviews, Ceylan claims that his locations are immaterial and that he could stage the film’s action anywhere – but this is manifestly false. Like an American western, Ceylan’s films are about the relationship of people to landscape and he loads Climates with atmospheric snow storms and impressive weathered ruins. In each of his films, Ceylan shows a figure brooding beneath lowering skies awesome with immense, involuted storm clouds. In the same breath in which Ceylan denied the significance of the places where he shoots, he also said that each place has a “golden location” – that is, a camera location that imparts the most precise and beautifully designed information about that place. Ceylan’s powerful pictorial sense is manifested by his leading ladies’ – he casts his wife, Ebru Ceylan, one of the world’s great beauties, as Bahar and the woman who plays Serap is also frighteningly gorgeous and seductive. Even his most lugubrious scenes have a movie star quality, a sense of pictorial glamour; even squalor on the Kurdish-Turkish border takes on a high-fashion luster in his hands. Climates is not that great of a film. It’s impressive and has stunning photography but the story is minimalist and others, most notably Bergman, have covered this terrain more effectively. It’s an art house picture full of alienation, loneliness, brooding landscapes embodying the character’s anomie, in many ways as generic as an American thriller. Everything in the picture has been done by someone else just a little bit better and so the film is not a major work by Ceylan, but it is certainly well-made, interesting, and thought-provoking.