Climas

This film was really impressive (I agree with everything localdj2001 said), and much better than I expected. I saw it at the Melbourne Film Festival to a capacity audience.

Some people cannot enjoy a film if they cannot feel for the characters. If so, this is not the film for you. The characters are all flawed, and not particularly likable (kudos to the director/actor for allowing himself and his wife to be portrayed in this manner).

We have a reasonable size established Turkish community in Melbourne. This film introduced me to a more modern view of the Turkish that we don't see here. Culturally, it was very interesting.

The film reeks with emotional honesty. It is mature, adult cinema. The story is somewhat cryptic as there are aspects of a collapsing relationship that are never revealed. But unfolding events reveal that everything is not what it seems. And real life is like this - we see something and think we know, but we only know the little glimpse we have seen.

What is said in this film is sparse but interesting. And what is not said is just as interesting. There are very long takes, some of which nothing much seems to happen. In others, there is much happening.

The title is very clever because it adds weight to the background of the film, which is the changing seasons. The cinematography was really stunning, especially at the end. Lighting was terrific. The film lingers long after the credits.

This is the first film I have seen by this director, but he is surely very accomplished. If very high quality, intelligent, artful European cinema is your taste, go see this.

A director-as an artist-may choose to tell his story by using different parameters i.e.eloquent treatment of dialogue,scenery,costumes,soundtrack and sometimes visual effects. Another may yet choose to tell his/her story using spare plot,minimal dialogue,long still shoots and creative atmosphere.

Three-time Cannes winner director,actor,photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan follows the second path...

*Spoiler*

A sequel to Uzak,Iklimler,very simply is about a middle-aged academic still writing his thesis and his younger wife(director himself and his real-life wife Ebru Ceylan)who pass through the seasons in their marriage.As the story moves on-from summer to fall then to winter-we see the scenery and locations change in parallel with their inner conflicts.The couple cannot reconcile; separation and break-up is unavoidable at the end.

*Spoiler

Ceylan,with almost a Tarkovskian approach tells his story in the manner of a true auteur he is.

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.

We have recently heard about too much about Iklimler. There were mix of comments about the movie and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Half of them were negative, half of them were positive. There must be confusion in evaluating his movies. Then I went to the movie to see by myself.

At first sight Iklimler has absent story. The movie began from uncertain situation and goes on through uncertain path. Writer and director should have been separated with each other in order to give double power to the movie. Nuri Bilge Ceylan can be successful director, but he is not a writer as good as his directing talent.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan wanted to show us how to make a movie with simple story –even no story. The players are ordinary, music's are ordinary, but the movie itself is really artistic. He was focusing to the eyes effectively and eyes showed us emotions powerfully.

Natural voices were used in the movie and this technique should have been very difficult if we take into consideration open field's scenery. The conditions are not totally controllable in this kind of areas. This voice preference shows us Nuri Bilge's self confidence.

We can not criticize players well because they were seen in backgrounds. The movie itself depended on artistic scenes too much, not on players. Even though Nazan Kirilmis and Ebru Ceylan were good enough. Nuri Bilge himself is not talented as his directing skill. Nuri Bilge was known with misery. But after his playing it seems he will lose this misery. Other players were too naive and not suitable for the movie.

Panoramas were excellent. From the beginning Antalya-Kas, goes on with Istanbul-Beyoglu and finally Agri- Ishak Pahsa Palace. The winter season reflected with a hundred percent reality and beauty.

When we look at the overall Nuri Bilge made ego satisfaction in all writing, directing and playing dimensions. In directing dimension it is true that he is probably the best director in Turkey. Other dimensions were not sufficient to make the movie perfect. However, Nuri Bilge Ceylan did well with Iklimler for Turkish Cinema.

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!