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Film of the month: CLIMATES
Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan steps out in front of the camera for his brooding examination of relationships — proving himself a leading world director in the process. Nuri Bilge Ceylan got a fair few cinephiles flustered a couple of years back with Distant (Uzak), a beautifully controlled, droll look at the fraying friendship between a jaded photographer from Istanbul and a visiting cousin from the country who outstays his welcome. With its languid pace, striking compositions and self-reflexivity, here, perhaps, was the work of an heir to Abbas Kiarostami. Which makes the arrival of Climates, Ceylan's fourth feature, something to get worked up about. And it doesn't disappoint, both confirming his talent and taking it in the kind of dark directions the Iranian censors would never let Kiarostami get away with. Like Distant, it charts a crumbling relationship, this time between archaeology lecturer Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) and his younger lover Bahar (Ceylan's real-life wife Ebru), a TV art director. It begins with their break-up at a blustery Black Sea resort in summer. Alone on the beach, Isa rehearses his speech; it cuts to a profile view and he leans back, only to reveal Bahar behind him, listening to what he was formulating. It's a disorientating leap ahead that yanks you from the complacent contemplation Ceylan's exquisite compositions encourage elsewhere. Shot on high definition video, his frames are full of intrigue, fine-tuning you to delicate details: slight, heart-wrenching shifts of expression, a bird flapping past in the distance, a tear on a cheek. The no less subtly selective soundtrack focuses on the wind blowing, birds twittering, dogs barking in the distance and cigarettes crackling. In a film where the characters' emotional odysseys coincide with the changing seasons - break-up in summer, misery in grey rainy autumn, attempted reconciliation in the snowy mountains - everything feels metaphorical, and the effect can be quite exhausting. Lacking Distant's smoothness, Climates has far blacker elements wriggling out of its gently unravelling drama. Bahar dreams of a silhouetted figure immersing her head in the sand; a scooter ride back from the beach ends in a crash and Isa threatening to throw Bahar off a cliff; while back in rainy Istanbul, Isa seeks solace in disturbingly rough sex with an old flame. The film nails the dark, chaotic feelings that arise from a ruptured relationship. Isa is pretty unpleasant, but he's also confused, desiring an ex or Bahar one minute, rejecting them the next. There's a universal feel to his emotional journey, stressed by its synching with the seasons - we're all stuck with the same weather, and the same woes. Driving the film are the characters' feelings of entrapment and their attempts at escape, from Bahar's sand suffocation nightmare to Isa's stab at sexual consolation, which ends with the humping couple colliding into the camera, like they're trying to force their way out of the frame. Ultimately, Climates is a film that steadily, crushingly exposes the tyranny of emotion - how life's events set us on a shared, unalterable pattern of behaviour that must run their course - doing so with a severe beauty.
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