The more Climates will be seen, the more Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s methodical and drastic personality will become legendary. After Kasaba, Clouds of May and Distant, the movie depicts the breaking off of a couple, performed by Ceylan and his wife. The director proves he’s one of the worthiest sons of Antonioni : like in L’Avventura, nothing will remedy to this rupture. Each feeling that tries to recover the memory of this lost love won’t be anything but violent, absurd, irrational, almost grotesque. That’s why only one season misses in these climates, the spring when things can be born again. Instead, Isa shows how cruel and cutting he can be toward each new woman he meets, while his wife Bahar seems to freeze and disappear in the white snow of a Turkish winter.
Precise, scrupulous : these adjectives don’t apply less to the director than to the image itself. It made the movie’s fame after its HD screening in Cannes, where he won a prize in 2006. Ceylan has taken the most of the extravagant sharpness of digital technologies, which make every hair, every pore of the skin, visible. This sharpness talks by itself. That’s why the french DVD studio, Pyramide Video, doesn’t insist on it with more than a making-of, prefering to interview instead the sound editor, Olivier Do Huu, on the sound’s equal sharpness. Doing the exact opposite of what we expected allows us to learn that everything here is artificial. The fact that these Climates are far from the naturalism the title suggests makes the rupture more violent and sublime.
Antoine Thirion.
