Jahreszeiten

I just saw the film here in Chicago as part of the city's International Film Fest, and I have a few feelings left hanging around. True, Ceylan's films tend to be slow and he often leaves his character's unsatisfyingly shallow (see "Uzak," an even slower film than this one). But what leaves me intrigued is just this - the fact that he doesn't develop his characters. In "Climates," there are many close up shots which linger, leaving the characters suspended on the screen to be themselves, and these script-less glimpses of them speak volumes to me actually. So yes, in terms of how much is GIVEN to us as an audience, the characters are wanting. But in terms of how much we can construct in our minds, I feel the sky's the limit. I also found the generational difference between Bahar, the young wife, and the other few characters we're introduced to to be quite heavy. For while the other few people we see are all disillusioned by life and lazily struggle with it in the safe realms of their relative bourgeois lives, she seems to be the only one who sees something wrong with the whole picture. The catch is that while she sees through it, she also feels disillusioned by how wrong all the wrongs are, and so she keeps it to herself and simply starts crying. Interspersed throughout the film are subtle focuses on tiny details, like a bee, or snow flakes, which really highlight a rather poetic quality to the film. Overall I found the film to be falsely shallow. Audiences with short attention spans be warned!

I saw climates yesterday at the NY film festival.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a director who uses himself or his relatives to act in his own movies. In Climates he(Nuri Bilge Ceylan) and his real life wife (Ebru Ceylan) are the main characters and his mother and father are his real life parents as well. In his role, he is a professor at a university and his wife is in visual arts. During their trip in Kas which is a very hot place located in southern Turkey these two fall out and their conversations almost come to an end in this hot climate.This not sharing much leads up to the husband asking for their separation.As they got back the regret the husband feels takes him to find his wife with a crew she was working with in the beautiful but very cold and snowy city of Agri located in Eastern Turkey.The climate changes and so does their minds..

This movie is more of analyzing the relationships between people. His success comes from how he could reflect the depth of his characters and their emotions and minds with very little conversation.Nuri Bilge Ceylan's style is based on a strong plot. He focuses more on human relations with very little happening around them but more importantly what is happening inside of them and between them. I enjoyed every second of the movie with curiosity.I recommend this movie highly.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's enigmatically titled film, 'Climates', is quiet, stark, intimate and in places, quite beautifully shot. The story of the breakdown of a relationship, it depicts lives characterised by selfishness, emotional reticence and harshly physical sexual encounters. In spite of these strengths, the film also has weaknesses: the central character, played by the director himself, seems utterly undeserving of our sympathy (beyond the fact of his inner loneliness); and it's always hard to make a film about emotional emptiness without the film itself feeling, in places, slow and empty. This is particularly true of the film's opening, which makes no concessions to the fact that the audience doesn't yet know the characters well enough to be sufficiently interested in the painful detail of their lives. But the end, it has grown to present a certain emotional power of its own. It's always rewarding to see something other than a Hollywood version of the nature of human interaction; but at times, the film wanders, lost like its protagonists.

The films of Michelangelo Antonioni will either bore you to death or captivate you in the most subtle of ways. I fall into the latter category and am profoundly influenced by his work and the filmic conventions integral to them. It was my discovery of Antonioni's work that led to my discovery of New German Cinema, both of which ultimately shaped the way I watched and interpreted films. Brought up on a steady diet of Hollywood movies, I was conditioned to be a passive viewer, one swept away by movies made solely for entertainment purposes. In many ways I still am that little boy who gets lost in the fantasy world on the silver screen, but as an adult I've learned the films that truly make me feel alive are the ones forcing me to be an active participant in what is being projected before me. In other words, films that challenge me by asking questions in lieu of providing absolutes.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's is an Antonioni disciple and his 2006 film Climates is unmistakably an Antonioni clone. From the story of a couple's dissolving relationship on vacation (one part L'Avventura one part La Notte) right down to the compositions of every shot and the very deliberate pacing, Ceylan wears his influence with pride. Cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki beautifully frames every shot, where the meticulous compositions are allowed to play out in patient long takes. As it is with Antonioni's films, the minimal use of editing allows the viewer to study things they normally wouldn't get a chance to even consider. Things like landscape, diegetic sounds and subtleties expressed by the actors, all take on heightened significance where, ultimately, this minutiae plays a crucial role filling in the blanks predominant throughout the film. In other words, films like Ceylan's and Antonioni's challenge their viewers to think, to read between the lines and to actively search for context, meaning and subtext within every frame of their films.

As much as I love to revisit the thrills of my youth with standard Hollywood fare, nothing bests a filmgoing experience where I'm not only expected to think and feel as an adult, but am forced to act like one. What an interesting world we'd live in if the blockbusters were all films designed for adults.

http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/

Ceylan's previous feature, Distant, won the Grand Prix at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival; its glowing reception cemented his status as a major contemporary auteur. In Climates, Ceylan takes us to stunning locations all across Turkey in what may be his most personal film to date - in addition to directing and starring, he also wrote and edited. Filmed with his signature contemplative style, it is a highly subdued, deliberately-paced work that conveys more through silence than through exposition. The cinematography by Gökhan Tiryaki achieves a new high for high-definition video with its refined, poetic images, while Ceylan's precise, beautiful compositions give the film a characteristically elegiac tone. This achingly poignant film subtly captures the emotional tremors that ripple through a fallow relationship.