Critics reviews

Shifting between his characters' outer and inner realities with a deft, novelistic omniscience, Ceylan nonetheless remains resolutely outside their motives in the film's most disturbing scene, a sexual conquest that appears to be rape but isn't described as such. Under the guise of the universal theme of love and its mysteries, Ceylan offers a glimpse of harsh and unresolved local particulars.

The air is alive in Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylon's "Climates" -- more alive than the characters, who are like inert lumps of rock or sand. But that's the point. In this movie, so finely attuned to frequencies of light and sound, it's the invisible space around the characters that swarms with life and possibility. Their interior lives are muddled, opaque even to themselves, and they can't express anything directly, not even their own anguish and dissatisfaction.

It is absolutely riveting and painfully honest. This movie is art house angst in its purest form, but I cannot imagine anyone, anywhere over the age of 30 failing to find Climates deeply affecting.

Unfolding over the course of three seasons - summer at an Aegean resort, autumn in rainy Istanbul, and winter in a remote, snow-covered region of Eastern Turkey - it's a deeply personal, poignant work. "Ordinary stories of ordinary people", is how Ceylan describes his cinema, and those who saw the filmmaker's previous study of alienated masculinity Distant will be familiar with the contemplative, pared-down style of Climates. Dialogue is secondary to the high-definition digital video images and the expressive soundtrack, with aural motifs such as dogs barking connecting all three sections.

"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.

Climates marks the transformation of an interesting director into a great one. The stylistic strategies of Ceylan’s early films here reach their fulfillment, his command establishing itself most notably in his preference for very long (often static) takes, allowing the actors to negotiate a remarkable range of emotions and responses, every subtle nuance of expression conveying meaning.

The film's sum total is a shrewd portrait of emotionally desiccant, unconsciously insincere masculinity (a comparison to Pialat's protagonists is apt); the final shot, a fade-out disappearance, plays as a condensation of the famous coda of Antonioni's L'Eclisse, some sort of statement on the continuing life of places after the disappearance of people, which neatly connects to the film's emphasis on archaeology.

The maturity of Ceylan's storytelling is evident from his refusal to tellus too much: he prefers silences and finely-tuned facial expressions providethe nuances we need to fill in the blanks for ourselves. In terms of what facescan express, without ever doing too much, Climatesputs Ceylan on a par with Ingmar Bergman.