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Climates
For a film that starts out promising to turn into Le Mepris, Climates is a surprisingly fond and tender portrait of the breakdown of a relationship and the ensuing sense of desolation. The main characters are arthouse stereotypes: Isa is a middle-aged, rather dull professor and photographer, Bahar his more free-spirited younger lover. But the vanity-free performances, by the film's writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his wife Ebru Ceylan, breathe fresh, flawed life into these conceptions. Neither goes begging when it comes to close-ups, yet both perform fairly well the trick of remaining opaque. This is easier for Ebru Ceylan: Bahar becomes something of an idealised enigma, drifting serenely through light-to-moderate blizzards in a chunky woollen hat that's sure to become next winter's accessory of choice for whimsical young women. What this couple create together, though, is unusual: a love story in which we empathise strongly with both players while hoping they will go their separate ways. Climates spans three seasons in Turkey, from the couple's summer holiday in Kas and Isa's lonely return to Istanbul in autumn to winter in the Mount Ararat region, where Isa travels to suggest a reunion with Bahar, who is working there on a TV show. Enough time is allowed in each shot for the unostentatious beauty of a location to register before Ceylan, who co-edited with Ayhan Ergürsel, cuts away. Such visual delights as a yellow taxi cutting * through a snow-mottled mountain landscape, or Bahar wading into the ocean on a bleached-out summer's day, are given short shrift compared to the five-minute static set-up depicting an awkward dinner conversation, or the time spent lingering on the actors' faces. Ceylan's compositional skills surpass even his work in Uzak(2002). Entire gags arise from the simple placement of people on screen - Isa's huge, Gulliveresque foot resting on the car dashboard in the foreground of a shot, or his lover Serap suddenly thrusting her leg into view to catch his eye, and ours. Ceylan's close-ups are worth many pages of a lesser film-maker's script. Nowhere is this more true than in the images of Bahar in the early scenes set in the ancient ruins of Kas, when the story of this waning romance is written on her face. "Are you bored?" Isa asks her when he has finished wandering between stone pillars in a lethargic game of peek-a-boo. She answers in the negative but we know better, having seen the preceding close-ups. Even more eloquent is the focus on Bahar as she watches Isa stumble among the distant ruins: her affectionate chuckle, and the imperceptibility with which it shades into tears, places on the actress' shoulders the job traditionally left to flashbacks and backstory. Echoes of this early scene return in the picture's final section. Isa falls down again, in the snow this time, but now there's no one around to see him, except us. And Bahar earns another long close-up, very nearly the final shot, only this time her expression is complex to the point of unfathomable. Is she downcast because she has chosen not to resume her relationship with Isa? Or is she merely pensive, having cast her mind back over their time together? She may, in fact, have gone with him back to Istanbul, an interpretation that is ») encouraged when she simply fades from the screen, leaving only the ragged snowflakes falling where she stood a moment before. This is typical of the ambiguity that runs through Climates, rattling our confidence in what we are seeing, not to mention hearing (the sound editors Thomas Robert and Erkut Gormez ratchet up the sense of uncertainty with some disorienting sound design). Mild ellipses turn what could have been a straightforward drama, along the lines of La Separation (1994), into something a mere block or two away from the neighbourhood of early Polanski. When Isa sits on the beach rehearsing his break-up conversation, Bahar is abruptly revealed to be sitting beside him, though she was in the ocean a split-second earlier. Bahar's nightmare about being buried alive, staged as though it's really happening, makes us view with suspicion her subsequent attempt to make Isa crash his moped while she's riding pillion. There's no relief from these peculiar subversions, like the drumming rain that accompanies the photograph of a white beach in a holiday brochure, or the misleading sight of figures assembled at a grave, which has nothing to do with the central story. Likewise, no instance of intimacy goes undisturbed, from Isa tearing off Serap's clothes while a telephone rings loudly, to his imploring speech to Bahar, which is subject to the laughter and intrusions of her colleagues. Climates is a quiet work on the surface, but the psychological turmoil is so acutely rendered that we may crave respite without realising it. In the entire film, Isa and Bahar are only shown spending one night together, fully clothed in a drab hotel room. No one walks in, and the front desk doesn't call up to ask if Isa wants the full breakfast. The scene's comparative peace and simplicity are received by the viewer with gratitude.
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