Art Review - March Issue - (Page 123)

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Woody Allen has for years been professing astonishment that anyone should imagine that he remotely resembles his on-screen character. In 1993, Canadian director Atom Egoyan and his wife, actress Arsinée Khanjian, visited Armenia, where they made Calendar, about a couple who split up on a trip to Armenia. Egoyan and Khanjian played the leads, and claimed to be taken aback when audiences assumed that the film reflected the state of their relationship. Cinema, of course, is never a mirror of reality, and when filmmakers appear to use it as a vehicle for self-portraiture, it’s more likely that we are actually looking at a mask. Woody Allen’s films, like Calendar, are not directly about the person who made them, but they certainly seem to represent that person’s need to fictionalise himself and those around him. To date, few apparent first-person films have come quite as close to the bone in marital terms as Calendar, but now it has arguably been outdone by Climates, the new feature by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Climates too is about a couple who go on holiday and split up, in this case dramatically and rancorously. The woman, Bahar, leaves to get on with her life and her work in production design; the man, Isa, whom the story follows, appears to be irreparably stalled in bruised self-pity. What makes the film so uncomfortably intimate is the fact that Isa is played by the director himself, Bahar by his real-life wife, Ebru Ceylan. When the couple speculate about whether or not the age difference between them is a problem, the visible fact that Nuri really is, by some way, the older of the two makes it impossible to dismiss the parallel between real and fictional partners as merely part of the story: the Ceylans are inescapably implicating themselves, although that fact may well be more uncomfortable for the viewer than for the couple. Ceylan has drawn on his own life before, no less selfconsciously. His first films, Kasaba 1998 and Clouds of May 1999 , were respectively about a small town like the one where Ceylan grew up, and about an arrogant filmmaker’s attempt to make an autobiographical feature not unlike Kasaba. In Uzak Distant 2002 , about a disillusioned Istanbul-based photographer and his country cousin, former-photographer Ceylan not only cast his own cousin Emin Toprak in the latter role, but shot in his own Istanbul flat, as well as giving his lead actor much of his own wardrobe and even his own car to drive. Ceylan’s disingenuous justification is that such homemade measures simply keep the budget down. Even so, whether or not you’re aware who plays its leads, Climates immediately strikes you as a singularly hard-edged and entirely unnarcissistic essay in indirect self-portraiture. It’s without a doubt one of cinema’s most pitiless essays on conjugal life since Ingmar Bergman’s heyday; it also comes across as the director’s vulnerably besotted love letter to his wife and co-star. THE RESULTS ARE OFTEN FASCINATING The film begins with the couple on holiday. Isa, a university lecturer, photographs ancient architectural sites, while Bahar looks on, conspicuously bored: what Ceylan, however, is really looking at all this time and by implication, Isa too, though he doesn’t really see her is Bahar/Ebru herself, whose features, sometimes blank, sometimes subliminally pained, are shown up close, the mystery that he is consistently puzzling over but never able to fathom. Ceylan contemplates her expression like an unmapped landscape: the film is shot on high-definition video, its astonishing clarity giving equal prominence to facial features and to terrain, which take on a strange equivalence as objects of contemplation. Ceylan himself, however, often contrives to make himself look both ageing and childlike, brutish and sometimes ungainly, but above all exposed: for a filmmaker to show the camera the naked soles of his feet, as Ceylan does early on – they are propped up against the car windscreen as he dozes en route – is surely to strip away any last vestige of false mystique. Ceylan can be rivetingly tough on himself – or, through his character, on the figure of the cosmopolitan male Istanbul intellectual. Isa comes across as weak, self-pitying, inept at emotional communication, offhandedly callous: he takes a cab driver’s photo, promises to send him a copy, then crumples up his address, an act all the more shocking in its utter mundanity. He is also emotionally exploitative, with a violent streak: he gets together simply because he can with an old flame at her apartment, then grapples her to the floor in an unmistakable act of rape, although he may not see it as such. The scene, shot in an unforgivingly long take, is all the more shocking in the way it ends: the noise of a lamp rolling on the ground suddenly merges into the sound, as the next scene begins, of a sewing machine operated by Isa’s mother herself played by Ceylan’s own mother . Climates is often painful to watch, not because it’s harrowing as such, but simply because you feel that the Ceylans are exposing themselves too much, inviting us to intrude into their intimacy – and in the first instance, to make the naive assumption that that intimacy actually is their own. We find ourselves constantly asking ourselves exactly how we feel about watching this, all the more so since the film never tells us what its characters are feeling: this is an essay in the unsaid, with the characters’ emotions always remaining implicit, obscured or interrupted just on the point of revelation. For all its immediacy, Climates is an extremely composed, complex film, as close to a novelistic layering of meaning as you’ll find in contemporary cinema: like Uzak, it reveals subtle new shifts of meaning on repeated viewings. As well as reasserting Ceylan’s status as a world-class filmmaker, Climates reveals a striking talent in Ebru Ceylan, whose pensive, acerbic reserve seems throughout the film to be coolly judging the camera and, by implication, the man behind it.  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue

Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record

Art Review - March Issue

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