CINEMATIC Review

CLIMATES   **

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

2006

IDEA:   A husband and wife find themselves physically and emotionally detached from each other in an existential landscape of despair.

BLURB:   Here’s a tip: if you want to make an interesting, absorbing movie, make sure you have more than five minutes of story stretched out to a tedious hour and a half. Ceylan’s film, while a gorgeous collection of still photographs, is a dry and fruitless narrative that fails to register on any level of human empathy. What we get is a laborious, often self-indulgent practice in prolonged silence and even more prolonged long-takes, a drip-drip-drip slowness that furthers the viewer’s nagging patience while the story does its best to pretend like it’s a necessary development. This is the kind of art house film, I’m afraid, that keeps most people away from art house films in the first place. It shouldn’t be that way.