Word: ceylan
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...Franco's Spain and a wily insurgent servant (Maribel Verdú), fighting for possession of a sad, dreamy child. It's got sumptuous special effects and, finally, a mournful wisdom about love, honor and death. Also a standout was Climates, from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. This minor-key étude of love, sex and selfishness used minimalist strategies to reveal the shifting emotional allegiances of a college professor, played with gruff appeal by the director. Shortbus, a U.S. romantic comedy set in a New York City sex salon, might have been the outrage of the festival, since it contained...
Tomorrow night the Palme d'Or and Cannes' other prizes will be handed out. The morning line of speculation from the critics had Pedro Almodóvar's Volver and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel holding as the frontrunners, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates as an honorable compromise candidate. But we know nothing. All the awards are chosen by the nine-member Jury headed this year by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, and they're not talking...
...Ceylan came to the attention of world cinema three years ago with Uzak (Distant), which won the Grand Jury Prize (second place) and two acting awards. It was enthralling or infuriating, depend on your threshold of love or pain for emotional minimalism. Climates was much more involving, perhaps because it's simply a better, more human film...
...begins with a middle-aged professor, Isa (played by the director), and his young girlfriend, Bahar (Ceylan's wife Ebru), at the archaic architecture site of Kas. As he photographs the ruins, she stands on a promontory, gazes at the view and cries. The camera holds on her for agonizing minutes, until a fly alights on her hair. Maxi-minimalism! The two are trudging toward a breakup. At dinner with friends, they quarrel publicly. "Don't worry," Bahar says of her hosts, "they enjoy seeing us miserable." (A remark that puts the relationship of critics to minimalist movie characters...
...Even those filmgoers who are averse to the minimalist aesthetic can find reasons to praise Climates. Here are four. One is that under its cloak of aesthetic severity, Climates has a beating heart, aware of the charm, selfishness and contradictions in any person. Another is that, though Ceylan the director loves taking long closeups of Ceylan the actor, he's worth it; this is a face, craggily attractive, that rewards extended attention. A third is that the movie occasionally reveals a wry, wise sense of humor. On his second encounter with Serap, she is the one eager to have...