Film
At several points during his new film Climates, Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan pulls off a neat visual trick: holding the camera close on the head of his hero Isa, a self-absorbed, stiff-necked university professor played by Ceylan himself, and then moving the camera just a little so that the audience can see the vast landscape or stunning antiquity that Isa is staring at, or the other person that we didn’t realize he was talking to. Ceylan also inverts that shot effectively toward the end of Climates, when Isa’s girlfriend Bahar (played by Ceylan’s wife Ebru) recounts at length a happy dream she had, and we watch her face change from glowing to stormy when we hear, just out-of-frame, Isa’s utter indifference.
Ceylan’s little trompe l’oeils make a larger point. The character he’s playing is a stone bastard: the kind of guy who sits in front of a gorgeous ocean view and considers whether or not his immediate needs are being properly met. He whines about Bahar’s “tone,” and shortly after he dumps her, he steals another ex-girlfriend away from one of his pals. When he visits his parents, they ask him to drop by more often, which he deflects with this nifty bit of double-speak: “I can’t, but I will try.” Isa’s just not a good dude.
But is he worth watching a movie about—especially one staged in the deliberate, hushed manner common to modern European art-cinema? That’s not such an easy question to answer. Fans of foreign-language films tend to want either a glimpse at a culture and an aesthetic wholly unlike their own, or one that’s universally recognizable. It can be tough to process a movie like Climates, which is somewhere in between, featuring characters locked in a very Westernized narcissism, but expressed by a director with Eastern austerity. We want these characters to talk to each other more, or at least take more action than merely walking across snowy hills, apparently lost in thoughts that we’re not permitted to share. Climates is so sparse that whenever anything happens at all, it sticks out.
But maybe that’s not so bad—especially when the memorable moments are staged so vividly. When Ceylan shows Bahar spitefully covering Isa’s eyes during a motorcycle ride, or the two of them trying to hold a life-changing conversation in an equipment van that other people keep stepping in and out of, or Bahar dreaming about Isa covering her whole body in sand, the scenes aren’t subtle in the least, but they’re gripping, funny and creepy by turns, and they punctuate the movie’s existential ennui in ways that make all the waiting around seem retroactively meaningful. Nearly everything pays off in Climates’ last couple of shots, where Ceylan resolves his characters’ tongue-biting and his own fascination with deep fields of vision. While Bahar silently contemplates Isa’s latest lapse, her face is partly obscured by falling flakes—as though she were standing inside a snow globe, freshly shaken.