Climates (2006) Review: A Relationship in Three Seasons

Is Climates worth watching?

Mostly yes. Climates is a piercing, visually stunning portrait of a relationship in decline, and one of the most honest films about male selfishness in modern art cinema. Nuri Bilge Ceylan observes a couple’s unhappiness with an unsparing eye, and his images of Turkish landscapes across the seasons are extraordinary. The reservation is that the film is deliberately cold and uneventful, and spending 98 minutes with a protagonist this evasive will feel like hard work to some viewers.

What is Climates about?

Climates follows İsa, a university lecturer in his forties, and Bahar, his younger partner, who works in television. When the film begins, they are on holiday on Turkey’s sun-baked southern coast, and it is immediately clear that something between them has gone badly wrong. Neither says what, and the silences grow heavier.

The film tracks the couple across three seasons, from summer on the coast to autumn in Istanbul and winter in the snowbound east of the country, as each tries to make sense of what remains between them. Nazan Kesal plays a woman from İsa’s past who complicates matters further.

Ceylan wrote and directed the film and plays İsa himself, opposite his wife, Ebru Ceylan, as Bahar. It is a Turkish production in Turkish, running 98 minutes, and it won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize at Cannes in 2006.

Weather as an emotional map

The title is both literal and metaphorical. Each season has its own palette and mood: the bleached glare and heat of the coast, the grey drizzle of Istanbul, the vast white stillness of the east. Ceylan, a former photographer, frames these landscapes with extraordinary care, and the shift from one climate to the next mirrors the changes in the characters’ inner lives. This was also his first feature shot on high-definition digital video, and he uses its clarity to capture faces in merciless close-up.

Sound matters just as much as image. Waves, wind, traffic and the crunch of snow often dominate over dialogue, and the long pauses between lines say more than the lines themselves.

A director unafraid to be unlikeable

The boldest choice is Ceylan’s decision to play İsa as a thoroughly unsympathetic man. He is passive, self-pitying and capable of casual cruelty, forever wanting what he has lost and neglecting what he has. Ceylan plays him without vanity, and the film’s willingness to expose male self-deception, including a scene of real discomfort between İsa and his former lover, is what gives it its sting.

Ebru Ceylan is superb as Bahar. With very little dialogue, she conveys hurt, longing and a growing resolve, and many of the film’s most powerful moments are simply close-ups of her face as she absorbs something she cannot say. She gives the film its heart.

Where the chill becomes a barrier

Climates is austere to a fault. Its narrative is minimal, its pacing slow, and it offers few moments of relief or warmth. Because İsa is so closed-off, the film sometimes feels as emotionally withholding as he is, and viewers looking for insight into why the relationship failed rather than how it feels may find it frustrating. It is a smaller, more fragile work than the director’s later masterpieces.

Who should watch Climates?

It suits viewers who love slow, observational art-house drama and films about relationships told through mood rather than plot. It is also essential for anyone following Ceylan’s career, sitting between his early films and his later, longer works. Expect a sombre tone and one uncomfortable sexual encounter, but little else of concern.

More from Ceylan:

• Distant, Ceylan’s earlier study of loneliness and emotional paralysis in a wintry Istanbul.
• Three Monkeys, his next film, a darker story of a family unravelling after a moral compromise.
• Winter Sleep, a later, fuller exploration of a self-absorbed man and the women who see through him.

The verdict

Climates is a precise, painful and gorgeously shot film about the slow death of a relationship. Its coldness and minimal story keep it from the heights of Ceylan’s best work, but its honesty about human selfishness and its extraordinary images make it well worth the patience.

Rating: 3.5/5