Climates movie review & film summary (2007)

The concept is to express what the characters are feeling better than they can, through images (mostly long, static takes) and sound, with minimal dialogue and even less narrative.

When we meet Isa (writer-director Ceylon) and Bahar (Ebru Ceylan, the real-life wife of the filmmaker), they are wandering through ruins in Kas that seem to express the current state of their relationship: dilapidated, empty, dead. They are both miserable, suffocating, as if the mere presence of the other person were sucking all the oxygen out of the air, even the ocean air. Isa's numb from the waist up, sleeping with his head resting in an empty drawer (for neck support), while Bahar alternates between sullenly imploding with self-pity or bitterly exploding with maniacal rage. They are everyone's nightmare of a couple.

One day, on the beach, they finally split. Back in Istanbul, the skies open up, relief falling like the gentle rain from heaven. But after some rough (and presumably cathartic) clothes-ripping sex with his sometime lover, the emotionally inscrutable Serap (Nazan Kirilmis) who is prone to prolonged fits of joyless laughter, Isa finds himself drawn back to Bahar and travels to the snowy location where she is working as the art director on a television series.

That's about all the story there is, because "Climates" isn't driven by plot and character, but by sensory information, visual and audible. It's a movie of languidly composed landscapes (which can actually be quite stimulating), and the characters are inseparable from the geography and the weather -- not unlike the enigmatic expressions of existential ennui in the '60s films of Michelangelo Antonioni ("Eclipse," "Red Desert") and Alain Resnais ("Last Year at Marienbad"). Ceylan shoots one bedroom scene as if the characters' heads were planets and their mostly clothed bodies aspects of the terrain. A shot of a plane flying across a white sky as snow falls into the lens is, in context, inexplicably breathtaking. "Climates" is a stunning film to look at, and to listen to.

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