iklimler - Climates by Nuri Bilge Ceylan


	nbc home

Under the Weather

Nick James, Sight & Sound, Volume 17, Issue 2, Feb 2007

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates examines the break-up between a photographer and his young girlfriend in minute detail - and stars Ceylan and his wife. It's a high-risk strategy, but it pays off, says Nick James.

Melancholy is said to pervade all the arts in Turkey, but that observation is particularly true of the work of the country's leading film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Indeed, Ceylan's films seem to luxuriate in a mood of languid inconsequence, of furtive alliances and anguished accommodations. Think, for instance, of the guiltily offhand way the city-based photographer in Uzak(2003) treats both his country cousin and his occasional lover. A Stygian murk envelops the corners of every room; a hangdog air of limited expectations sits on the shoulders of every character, as each of the men protects his comforts. In Uzak Istanbul seems a gloomy place iced with a fake beard of snow.

Ceylan himself gives off a genteel delicacy of feeling. He's charming company, with a voice like a cello being played by a talented child, but a sigh is second nature to him. In his interview with Ali Jaafar (see page 2 5) he gives his own reasons for his particular melancholy, but since he shares that trait with Turkey's most successful novelist Orhan Pamuk, we might find Pamuk's own explanation from his book Istanbul: Memories of a City as useful: "For me [Istanbul] has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy... I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, fallen-down wooden mansions: only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading."

Pamuk later offers a fulsome explanation of jiuzmh, the Turkish word for melancholy. It has two traditions, he says. According to the first, we experience huzun when "we have invested too much in worldly pleasures and material gain": a good Muslim shouldn't care so much about worldly things. According to the second, which arises out of Sufi mysticism, huzun is "the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah." A good Sufi suffers because he has not suffered enough. The consequence, Pamak concludes, is that huzun is held in high esteem and has become central to Istanbul culture.

Of course, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a very secular film-maker, but his new film Climates/'Iklimler is drenched in such melancholy. Istanbul is only a sideshow here, the rainy backdrop for a short central section of a film that otherwise starts in sun and ends in snow. Once again, as in Uzak, the main character is a photographer (as Ceylan himself is and was before he became a film-maker, see page 24), but instead of using his usual brilliant amateur stand-in Muzzafer Ozdemir, Ceylan here plays the central role of Isa himself. And to compound the feeling of auteurist risk-taking, Ceylan's wife Ebru plays Isa's lover Bahar.

Ceylan's stab at acting is very impressive, but it's as a photographer that he affects us most - or rather as a photographer and user of soundtrack, since sound is what one tends to experience first when watching a Ceylan film. Certainly it is the way his exquisitely composed, quiet images play against a background of busy natural sounds that gives him distinction. And he has a real gift for cinematographic surprise that I want to explore here by focusing on three sequences from Climates that represent his work at its best. For Ceylan composes his films from a small number of long sequences that seem thoroughly thought through, no matter how much he protests that he doesn't know where best to put the camera until he's on set.

Horror-movie techniques
The first sequence comes after we have learned that academic photographer Isa, and his much younger lover Bahar, who works in television production, are not getting on. They're on a summer trip along Turkey's southern coast, though Isa is also photographing a nearby archaeological site for his dissertation. He seems constantly irritated by Bahar's behaviour, and nags her. She is weepy because she realises the relationship isn't working.

A head-on shot of the dazzling sun begins the sequence, followed by a shot of Bahar lying on a beach, her face and upper body beaded with glinting sweat. She may be sleeping; she is utterly still. Behind her, a blur of a silhouette morphs slowly into focus: a man walking up from the sea, his feet crunching the sand. We feel it will be Isa, and we're proved right when he gets close and picks up a towel. The mood is somehow creepy. Isa's shadow falls across Bahar, rousing her. Then his dripping profile moves into frame to kiss her. "I love you," he says. As they chuckle intimately together, Isa buries Bahar's legs in sand, then covers her up to her neck. Then Isa's silhouette, distracted by a bird call, slumps a little, before he pushes a wave of sand across her head, completely effacing her.

It's a shocking and unexpected act, implying in a single gesture the threat of being buried alive. But Bahar starts awake: the scene was a nightmare. Isa, face down over a notebook, admonishes her for falling asleep in the sun (he is quite the old man when he's nagging). She moves away from him towards the sea to sit on the shoreline watching a sailboat pass. In the foreground Isa sighs and turns to watch her. Bahar enters the glittering sea, and in close-up for a moment Ceylan's amateur status as an actor reveals itself as he tries too hard to convey agony and regret, sighing and wiping his nose.

Any scene in which a beloved is watched from a beach as they enter the water is bound to recall Vis-conti's Death in Venice(i 971), where the young boy Tadzio can be seen both as Botticelli's Venus returning to the waves and as death's harbinger for the watching composer von Aschenbach. Here it's the relationship that's doomed, and Bahar who is on her way out. Isa seems to rehearse the words he will use to part from her as he watches her. "Maybe we should go our own ways for a bit, what do you think?" he asks. Then he adds the caveats of convenience: "We'd still be good friends. I mean, it wouldn't change things a lot." At this point we're looking at a three-quarter angle of Isa's head and shoulders, but then he turns his head away and a small camera movement to the left reveals Bahar sitting beside his right shoulder. He is not rehearsing after all: this is the moment of break-up and Bahar is having none of the blandishments. "I don't mind," she says, to Isa's obvious irritation, and he continues to try to persuade her. A 'Scrap' incident is mentioned that Isa says screwed Bahar up; their age difference has "become a problem". "I don't need convincing, you know. I agree with you," says Bahar, but Isa carries on.

Besides the perfect framing and expert use of editing and sound, what makes the sequence unique to Ceylan are the sleight-of-hand surprises: the sand-smothering, and the time-jump reveal of Bahar at Isa's shoulder. These are, of course, horror-movie techniques grafted on to a slow arthouse relationship-destruction film, and all the more effective for that. But the other remarkable aspect of the sequence is the way it demonstrates how unsympathetic a character Isa is, and how Ceylan's insistence on playing him himself adds to the piquancy and to the possibility of turning, in the next sequence I'll describe, what ought to be a repellent scene into a semi-comic one.

Rough sex
It is now autumn and Isa is walking along Istanbul's famous main street Istiklal Cadessi, which is slick with rain. He and Bahar have parted. In a bookshop his old friend Guven accosts him. With him is Serap, an urbane-looking woman in spike heels, and a plausible cause of the 'Serap incident'. Cut to a street at night as Guven drops Serap off at her apartment. We know that Isa is lurking in the shadows and when Serap sees him her movements speed up, as if she were anxious to get inside.

Once there, she lingers in the hallway, thinking of what she's just seen. As she moves closer we see the back of her head move in to face her and we realise we're looking at a mirror shot. She turns her back on herself and pauses again, then we cut to her opening the door to Isa. He comes in, offers to leave if she wants him to, then demands coffee and maybe wine to follow. Scrap disappears for a long time. Isa fusses with the curtain (presumably he must not be seen); Serap doesn't answer when the phone rings. When she returns she finds Isa looking at a photo of her and Guven. Sitting on the sofa, smoking next to him, she asks waspishly: "You haven't been around for a while. Is Bahar out of town again?" "What has it got to do with Bahar?" he asks, and Serap starts to laugh.

Isa stands up and moves to a chair next to a bowl of nuts. Serap continues to laugh, and we see it's getting to Isa. "What are you laughing at for God's sake?" he asks. "OK. OK. Calm down," she says. Isa starts to throw the nuts in the air and catch them in his mouth. He throws one into her mouth, but the next falls on the floor. He stares at her for a long time then walks over to pick up the nut and sit next to her again. He criticises her shoes, then when she won't take the nut, he says: "Don't be so picky." "It's been on the floor," she says. "So? The floor's clean," he says. "I told you I don't want it," she says, and slaps it away.

What happens next is fraught and extraordinary because of how it plays with an audience. We hear a rumble of thunder. Isa rests his head in Scrap's lap. She's about to put her arm around him when he starts to nuzzle her. She rolls her eyes in exasperation. They kiss lightly, but then it turns into a struggle as she wrestles to stop him getting more intimate. He climbs on top of her; she pulls at his hair. They topple from the sofa on to the floor, where he pins down her arms. She hits him and struggles hard but he keeps her pinned down as he tears off her sweater and bra. He's clearly forcing himself on her but she's putting up a discreet fight - and the unexpected consequence is that the
scene comes across not as a rape but as an inadvertently comical dumb show. The audience I saw it with laughed a lot. It's funny perhaps because it's all about the nut. Or perhaps we excuse ourselves by assuming they have always enjoyed rough sex.

Given that the director himself is playing the perpetrator, there's a strong need to think his character is incapable of assault. But we ought to consider too that Serap must protect her reputation and can't put up a noisy fight in an Istanbul apartment. Still, as the movement of intercourse shunts her body across the floorboards towards the nut he will force her to eat, it's farce that wins out. In any case, the nasty aftertaste soon dissipates in a later scene when she calls him and chuckles down the phone. She's happy to make a second date, but when he arrives she tells him that Bahar has a new job making a television series in eastern Turkey and he loses interest in an instant.

There is another interesting way of reading the Serap assault, though it's so tenuous as to be unlikely. Going back to the moment in front of the mirror after Serap has locked the door, the jump to Isa suddenly being there could be her imagination at work. After all, we've had one female dream, Cocteau's mirror is present and the theme of the film is the gulf between what women want from Isa and what he's prepared to give. But in the end the assault scene is too plausible for it to constitute a fantasy, and we should perhaps see the uncertainty as another strategy to keep us off-guard.

Ice and snow
The final sequence I'll describe comes after Isa has followed Bahar to a production set in the region around Mount Ararat. He turns up ostensibly to shoot the nearby palace of Ishakpasha for his thesis, and traipses around a snow-coated town until he finds the hotel where Bahar is staying. The typically pained meeting of ex-lovers that ensues ends with her saying she must leave. "Good luck in your work," she tells him - an obvious sore point. "You too," he says. But after a moment standing in the ice and snow he comes back to find her, proffering a trinket he bought for her and she left behind. The crew direct him to a white transit van.

What follows unfolds in a single head-on two-shot of Isa and Bahar sitting in the back of the van, Isa in the second seat from the left, Bahar in the fourth by the window. Isa has slid open the door to find Bahar quietly weeping. He asks her repeatedly why she is crying, but it only makes her worse. Eventually she speaks. "Why are you here?" she asks. Isa pleads that he has changed and wants Bahar to give up her job and come back with him to Istanbul. She starts to sob heavily. "I feel I'm ready to start a new life now," he continues. "To get married and have kids. To even leave Istanbul and move somewhere else... To turn over..."

The door to the left rumbles open, interrupting him. A technician puts a case on the seat in front of Bahar and closes the door. "I'm ready to give up material things," Isa continues, but is interrupted now by the back door opening for more kit to be stowed. After a few more intrusions, he manages to get to his punchline: "I know I can make you happy." Bahar counters by insisting that he answer one question honestly. "Did you see Serap again after we broke up?" "No, of course not," he replies. One of Bahar's colleagues climbs in off camera and tells her they'll be leaving soon. Isa repeats his offer but the spell of his rhetoric is broken (for now). "I'm sorry but it's too late now," she says. "Well fine then, I'm going," he says. As he gets out she lets out a burst of ironic laughter.

We see again here that Ceylan can conjure a bitter, humorous counterpoint that both heightens the emotions and mocks the insincerity inherent in the language of relationship problems. The director's courage in playing such a deeply flawed man is all the more surprising given that he's acting opposite his wife, who is set up from the start as the character most deserving our sympathy. In this last scene Ebru is a charming, fluffily self-contained girl in a pink coat and woolly hat. Ceylan, unshaven as ever and in a green parka, looks every bit the photographer-stalker.

What one misses from my descriptions of these sequences, unfortunately, is Ceylan's main strength. For it is in the long pauses between words that the film catches fire, in the sorrowful glances and deep drags on cigarettes. Isa's melancholy comes from the knowledge that the women he is with, both of whom have reserves of strength he lacks, only make him aware of how earthly he is, how concupiscent. And he cannot bear it.