Top Films of the Decade: #8 Climates

Climates
(2006)

Few artists trigger my tear ducts like Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Climates, his sublime fourth film, elicits pure awe -- the stuff of Stendahl syndrome. This movie hit me like a panic attack. Watching it, I felt my chest balloon, as though Ceylan himself had stuck a bike pump in my heart and pushed down with all his weight.

Confession: When it comes to Nuri Bilge Ceylan, I have a problem with hyperbole.

In Climates, Ceylan trains his photographer's eye on expressive facial close-ups and ominous Turkish landscapes. Note the image above, as well as this one:


Faces (and the environments in which we see them) speak louder than dialogue in this film. Such images riff off a central thesis: Seasons change and so do hearts. Summer transforms into fall; lusty looks become apathetic glances. Vibrant eyes grow vacant. Love fades. Resentment, boredom, and alienation take its place.

Ceylan's fixation with the human face echoes one art-house master (Ingmar Bergman), while his fascination with those alienated by their vast surroundings recalls another (Michelangelo Antonioni). But the similarities end there. Climates, unlike many movies by those directors, feels like the work of a real human being, not a detached observer spotlighting mankind's flaws. There's nothing cold, clinical, or nihilistic about Climates. Ceylan reveals our weaknesses, not to prove that love is futile, but to portray an honest, adult depiction of our species. His findings ring authentic, not misanthropic. Ceylan actually wants his characters to find happiness; he doesn't mock them for trying. To dive in despite the odds, after all, is only human.

A simple story about love and loss, Climates is a feature-length poem on the funny/sad patterns you'll find across romantic relationships. It's the work of a natural filmmaker emulating his idols (Andrei Tarkovsky and the above-mentioned directors) while injecting a humanism all his own. Climates captures the conflicting emotions of love: the euphoria, the bittersweet, the catty, the crash. Like Josh Brolin said, there's "a helluva a lot of truth in it."