Climates, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s first foray into the digital format, is “a painful, unapologetically downbeat film... at once respulsive and attention-grabbing,” says SIMON WOOD.


A PAINFUL, unapologetically downbeat film, Climates seems almost designed to test the limits of its audience. Not only does Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan exaggerate his story – Tarkovsky-like – with lingering shots of barely-moving actors, his fourth feature film trades so heavily in deception and rapid shifts in sympathy that any presumed moral centre is quickly undermined in favour of newer approaches.

Ceylan himself, despite limited acting experience and confessed lack of confidence in front of camera, takes the film’s lead role in addition to his usual directing, writing and editing credits. His character, Isa, is a rougeish university lecturer in the throes of a painful break-up with his partner Bahar (in turn played by the director’s wife, Ebru Ceylan).

The cut-and-thrust between the two, almost all of it implied and inferred, is the film’s backbone. That this doesn’t become clear until the final twenty minutes makes it that much more frustrating. Everything does fall into some sort of order, but not in the way we might have thought they would judging by the characters early behaviour.

Until those final key scenes Ceylan takes us on a mini-tour of Turkey. The film begins in the Mediterranean resort of Kas during Isa and Bahar’s summer holiday. When they bicker and eventually break-up, the setting changes to Istanbul in a drizzly autumn before moving to Dogubeyazit, a snow-bound city in the country’s eastern reaches for the finale.

Not surprisingly, given the symbolism of a giant, metropolitan city, it is the Istanbul segment that Ceylan chooses to stage his most adventurous scene. Isa, newly single, returns to a previous mistress’ apartment, slowly seduces her and, in a single, continuous shot, makes love to her with extraordinarily brutal force. The effect is that the audience can not be sure if the act is consensual or not unless attention is focused on the screen. Climates is that type of dichotomic film, at once respulsive and attention-grabbing.

The latter is mostly attributable to Ceylan’s sense of composition, colour and timing. Previously a photographer, his fine eye (so gracefully restrained, it feels like it’s been influenced by endless rewatchings of Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze) captures, not only the various seasons on show in vivid colour, but also the minutiae of body language so important to a film like this.

Because dialogue is kept to an absolute minimum, the audience must pick clues from the mise en scene: Isa’s contemplative gaze, for example, slowly sipping a coffee and smoking a cigarette while staring out a window, or symbolic distance between the two lovers even as they sit within touching distance in a van surrounded by fog.

Ceylan’s decision to film in a digital format for the first time has allowed him to exploit this, his most obvious gift. Although he claims he chose HD to cover for his insecurity as an actor by allowing him unlimited takes, there is no doubt that Climates is an ideal film for his first foray into the format. The thin film of sweat on Bahar’s body as she sleeps on a beach, for example, and the rich white snowy avenues of Dogubeyazit both add a component to the film that would be missing on standard film.

Several critics at Cannes 2006, the film’s international premiere, were quick to criticize Ceylan for choosing the digital approach, claiming that it clashed with his long-take style. Despite this, however, that film still walked away with the FIPRESCI prize, chosen by the global cinematic press, at the same festival and has proven far and away to be Ceylan’s most commercially successful international film. Although flawed, Climates wallows in its own anxiety and there’s a certain thrill in seeing cynicism portrayed with such enthusiastic accuracy and ironic beauty.