Climates (Iklimler)
True to its title, "Climates" begins on the shimmering Mediterranean coast of Turkey and ends in the relentless snow drifts of the easternmost region of the country. But far from being a Weather Channel exposé, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's new film is about the changing emotional temperature between two people. It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction. How much unchecked desire can a person have? When is it time to narrow the focus? Is there ever truly one?
Playing at the Museum of Fine Arts through Jan. 17, the movie isn't prescriptive. Piercingly, ruefully, it simply is.
Ceylan casts himself as Isa , a college professor whose relationship with a somewhat younger woman named Bahar has exceeded its expiration date. Played by Ceylan's own wife, Ebru , the woman is an art director for a television show. When we meet them, they're on a summer jaunt to Kas , whose ruins Isa surveys for a future university lecture. From a distance, Bahar watches him stroll among the wreckage of a once-magnificent site, and the personal symbolism is unmistakable. Once, they were magnificent, too.
At dinner with friends, Bahar is irritable. The next day Isa ends their relationship, on the beach, in the blinding sun. Yet the sequence is full of surprise; at one point, Ceylan shows us Bahar's daydream, which features a cruel act of horseplay. Then he fools us again with Isa's speech, which we're meant to think is a rehearsal. In about 15 brilliant minutes, the director conjures shifting perspectives and an unstable interplay between states of mind: sadness, affection, fear, revulsion, contempt, acceptance, remorse. These are microclimates.
Back in Istanbul, the now-single Isa runs into Serap (Nazan Kirilmis ), a classy ex. Bahar once mentioned her bitterly, and the gloom Isa appears to be fighting when he bumps into her is evident. She's dating one of his old acquaintances now. Nonetheless, curiosity about an old love turns into a deep hunger to taste it again.
Later, Isa knocks on her door. And what ensues between them belongs on a National Geographic special, in the movie lust hall of fame, and at the Olympics: They have gold-medal sex. Kirilmis is extraordinary, drawing the line between a dame and a cavewoman, then erasing it. For a moment, the slapping, grunting, ripping, heaving, and pulling of hair seems fit for a lady.
But Isa exists in a permanently curious state, drifting east to the town of Dogubeyazit , looking for, well , it's never entirely certain. This is a man who wants everything and more. The filmmaker makes Isa's insatiability a kind of existential quest to fill a bottomless hole of romantic want. As an actor, Ceylan's warmth complicates his character's apparent narcissism. Yet the movie's landscapes are desolate or frozen. As matters of either meteorology or mood, the seasons here are extreme.
"Climates" is Ceylan's second superb, occasionally comic , relationship movie. His previous film, 2002's "Distant," was about two men -- one haughty, one a hick from the hinterlands -- sharing an apartment in Istanbul. In every way, they were different. But their loneliness was the same. And in both pictures, Ceylan composes a visual syntax to convey isolation and its temporary dissolution. His m.o. is stillness.
Under no circumstances should that be taken to mean his movies are inert. In this new film, the camera captures the utter need roiling inside its lovers. The prevailing conditions are always subject to change. And whether to move on to newer, better climes seems like a terminal predicament of the soul.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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