The award-winning movie Climates puts Turkish cinema on the crest of a resurgence, says Marianne Gray. But a spiritual anguish lingers on
Leading Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s new film, the award-laden Climates (Iklimler), is an atmospheric and meticulous piece that dwells on the changing seasons of love between a man and his girlfriend, in Istanbul and along the rocky road of their relationship to a remote part of eastern Turkey.
Drenched in quiet imagery and style, the film starts in burning sunlight on a summer holiday in Kas, on Turkey’s southern coast, and ends in the silence of calm snow around Mount Ararat, chic new Western urban ways juxtaposed with the traditional Eastern life of rural society.
Ceylan and his real-life wife Ebru Ceylan are the leading players. Ebru plays Bahar, who works in television production and, as with all his films (most recently Uzak (Distant, 2003), there is a lot of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in his film. Once again, as in Uzak, the protagonist is a photographer, as Ceylan himself was before he became a film-maker, and with his photographer’s eye he has made an economic drama which tells an intimate story with visual precision and poetry.
“The film reflects my point of view on the relationship between men and women; it doesn’t solely concern Turkish society,” Ceylan told me. “I am inclined to focus on tiny details, for they often have great consequences.’
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