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Degrees of Self
A Turkish film called Climates confirms that two matters, once thought to be limited to certain parts of the world, are now international. The first of these matters is parochial to film--cinematography. Nowadays, in most film-making countries, cinematography is at such a high level that in a way we are getting spoiled--we simply expect it to be fine. (The improvement lessens our enjoyment of many once-hallowed films of the past.) Gökhan Tiryaki, who shot Climates, tells us from the first moment that, whatever else may be true thereafter, this film is going to be a treat for the eye. We soon see that the point is not pictorial beauty, although it is always before us. Tiryaki photographs the theme, not just persons and places. The second global element is that theme. It is no longer social news that a certain separation from joy--a lack of reliance on matters that might bring forth joy--is now endemic in much of the world. This malaise of self did not originate with World War II, but it has certainly expanded since 1945, notably in literature, theater, and film. (I haven't read the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was lately awarded the Nobel, but I gather that his work lives in this atmosphere.) Climates is not even the first Turkish film to tell us that Istanbul is, in that sense, part of the West, but the experienced writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan never explains his characters' spiritual state. He simply assumes that we will understand. Ceylan also plays the leading male role and shows quickly that he is a valuable screen actor of a certain kind--a presence as much as a performer, whose being verifies what he says and what he doesn't say. Ceylan's wife, Ebru Ceylan, who here plays his girlfriend, has a good deal of this quality; but, partly because of her role and also because of an evident temperament, she has other qualities as well. Ceylan plays a university teacher; she is the art director of a television series. On holiday at a seaside resort, they make their way through the ruins of ancient temples, moving like abstracted visitors through these monuments of faith. Time becomes almost visual in the way that Ceylan handles the pace of this sequence--so suggestively, almost oppressively, that we are not surprised to learn that this pair has reached the end of their relationship. Next day they part, with a kind of relief. Sustained passion, it is implied, is the province of old poetry, not of modern lives. The rest of Climates is about Ceylan's journey through solitude to a return to a former girlfriend, then to--in a surge that surprises him--an attempted reunion with the first woman. Much of this journey consists of cinematized thought and self-investigation. The chief overt action in the picture is his virtual rape of the second woman, though the sex becomes consensual. This episode is deliberately ripped out of the film's quiet texture; it is credible precisely because it is so strange. In the final sequence of the film, Ceylan follows his first lover to a wintry mountain location, where her television show is being made. Reunion is not glib. In the last shot he faces us alone as snow falls around him. He disappears: the snow remains. A dog barks. It is fair to ask if Climates would be as effective if it were set in a country from which we expect films of this tenor. Admittedly, the setting does heighten interest, but this film is much more than an ideational travelogue. Like all good art, it evokes a supranational affinity. And there is an unsurprising paradox: this drama of personal uncertainties is lodged in a certainty of form.
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