Climates

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!