Climates

It's a major detour along the narrative highway of contemporary cinema - what you could call modern minimalism, and which scholar David Bordwell has termed "contemplative cinema." We're talking about the kind of unmanipulative international art film heralded at film festivals and most famously exemplified in the last few decades by the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Carlos Reygadas, Bruno Dumont, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhangke, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and others. It's a school of film that derives from the austere precedents of mid-century giants Michelangelo Antonioni and Yasujiro Ozu - a cinema in which slows down movies' inherent urge to jabber and zoom and cut-cut-cut, so that we might participate in the drama, lean in, contemplate what isn't automatically revealed or spoken, consider the characters as three-dimensional people and their stories as mysteries about which we do not omnipotently know everything. Real time and grown-up knowledge about human beings are the default modes of experience.

Whatever you call them, these movies do require a patience and active engagement ordinary Hollywood-style movies do not, and it's not hard sympathize with the ticket-buying hoi polloi who come unprepared and even unwilling to embrace a new art film's ellipses and unaccelerated pace and enigmas. For fans, we all hope in our hearts that if we plopped our middle-brow parents or neighbors or hockey-fan pals down in front of the right "contemplative" art film (and someone should muster a better meta-genre title than this one), they'd see the truthfulness and wisdom and hidden beauty as we do. Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates (2006) is a masterful choice for the experiment - it couldn't be clearer in its narrative, essaying the ordinary collapse of a marriage, and yet the film communicates its emotional weather to us in ways that shock us with its secrets. The couple - an older but worldly architecture professor and his younger designer wife, played by Ceylan and his real wife, Ebru Ceylan - are vacationing on the Mediterranean, photographing ruins. We don't know what's going to happen, but then we discover it's already happening: the camera unceremoniously lingers, and lingers, on a closeup of the woman's face as she watches her man, and we see her forget her life, and then remember it, and then mourn it, crying.

From there, sorrow comes to town. The relationship dissolves the way they do in reality, and in Raymond Carver stories - with a derisive chuckle, with an unanswered question, with a secret nobody knows who knows. The husband is a self-absorbed bully, the wife is self-destructive and introverted, and the film is nothing less than the portrait of disconnection, assembled with such an unvarnished, steely gaze that it feels like an ordeal you've undergone yourself. The Ceylans (fictionalizing themselves; they are still married) nearly kill each other separating, then the husband struggles with being alone and nihilistic (seducing a slutty wife of a friend, in a particularly savage fashion), then, lost as one of Antonioni's heroes, tries to regain footing and substance by talking his way back into his ex-wife's life - which doesn't work as he'd hoped. Ceylan's camera favors observant angles, but it's mostly a character study of the man, a charming, sophisticated academic lost in his own life. Because the characters behave like real people, we participate emotionally in their scenes as if we were present, and because the characters do not deliver unrealistic exposition and therefore leave huge portions of context unmentioned, we explore on our own what may've happened in the past and what's going on behind their eyes now. This approach allows the film to be comprised of only a few long set-pieces - three extended scenarios, really - because as the minutes accrue we're not just learning plot points, but having the emotional experience.

Shot, rapturously, on digital video, Climates limns palpable, intimate human territory, but it's a great film because of Ceylan's subtle and restrained eloquence - the story, in films and in real life, is not unique, and perhaps a larger point to be made by "contemplative" art film in general is that no story is unique; it all depends on the quantities of grace and wisdom and reserve with which you capture it, and how we as viewers are respected as intelligent adults who do not fundamental human tribulations explained to us. "Eloquence" itself is a key concept - can you name a recent American film that could be lauded for its visual eloquence? For his last four celebrated films, starting with 2002's Distant, Ceylan could be considered as a one-man Turkish new wave, but his type of cinema has become a universalized global phenomenon, for which he is only the Turkish ambassador, and so films like Climates are not meant merely for local Turkish audiences, but for the Earthly citizens of Cannes-istan, a nation to which we all can belong, given the will. It's a demographic that could grow - sit your blockbuster-fixated friends down to Ceylan's first-hand account of marital collision and discontent, and see if they don't catch their breaths.

By Michael Atkinson