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The Spaces Between People, Even Lovers, in Images of Deceptive Simplicity
Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 27 October 2006
Some killers do their work in a frenzy of violence. Others wield the knife quietly: they carve out your heart without spilling a drop of blood. In “Climates,” a man and woman break up with hot tears and lacerating words; there isn’t a knife in sight and their hands look immaculate. There are early signs of trouble between them, but it isn’t until one night, when their anger escapes like poison gas, polluting the air and making them reckless, that the violence of their feeling emerges. In his voice you hear an old, familiar impatience: he talks to her as if she were a child. And when she laughs at him, you hear the bitterness.
“Climates” is the story of a man and a woman, one of whom murders the other’s love. It was written and directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a Turkish filmmaker who, with four features, has become an internationally recognized name. (His third feature, “Distant,” won the grand, or second-highest, prize at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival and had a limited release in America.) His interest in how we isolate ourselves from one another seems as simple as his visual style, which encourages contemplation rather than distraction. He holds his shots longer than most contemporary filmmakers, inviting you to rummage around images in which a change in focus and a darkly brooding sky mirror the discreetly shifting emotions creeping around their edges.
Mr. Ceylan is, as it also happens, a fine actor. He plays the lead in “Climates,” Isa, a professor who, when the film opens, is on a road trip with his younger girlfriend, Bahar (Ebru Ceylan, the director’s wife). The unhurried opening, which takes place amid ancient ruins, sets the pace and fixes the current climate: under the hot sun, Bahar watches as her lover distractedly walks around crumbled columns taking photographs and briefly stumbles (he smiles at his misstep), while remaining apparently oblivious to the tears that begin streaking her face. It’s on this same trip that they drink too much wine at dinner and that, one afternoon, she covers his eyes with her hands while he’s driving their scooter, causing an accident.
Isa and Bahar walk away from the accident intact though not unscathed. She returns home to Istanbul alone. Much of the rest of the film follows Isa, who, over the course of the ensuing fall and winter, emerges as a man of great surface charm. He teaches, plays tennis, politely rebuffs friends and, during one bravura scene, engages in a bout of raucous sex across a hardwood floor with another lover, Serap (Nazan Kesal). This blast of heat is so surprising (and funny) that it would be easy to overlook the intricate choreography involving the bodies and the camera, and how the nut that Isa playfully throws at Serap, and that hits the floor just before they do, finds a visual echo in one of her dropped earrings.
Like “Distant,” this film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words. Mr. Ceylan doesn’t write speeches or flatter the audience by offering us more information than he gives his character. His scenes play out to the natural rhythms of life, their meaning often articulated in silences, digressions and awkward laughter, as when Isa visits his mother, who repairs the pants he tore during his rollicking session with Serap, and then, with touching obliviousness, asks when he plans to settle down. Even when the dialogue sounds sharper, more obviously pointed, as in a casually sexist conversation between Isa and his office mate, its thematic importance tends to sneak in after the fact.
Although the film’s provenance and the calamitous distribution climate for foreign-language cinema in America mean that it’s destined for eye-blink runs at a handful of art-house theaters, “Climates” isn’t difficult or obscure. Its metaphors are transparent, its narrative structure uncomplicated. It’s a satisfyingly adult film about men and women and relationships that might seduce audiences more easily if it were French, though in that case it would probably be three times as chatty.
Mr. Ceylan has clearly been influenced by any number of modernist auteurs, including Michelangelo Antonioni. But while his films are similarly personal, they’re more accessible; h isn’t adding anything new to the language, he’s just extremely fluent. The mysteries of his work are those of the heart, the head, the soul.
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