Friday, March 30, 2007
Help me out, Ricky
DW is skipping town for a month, starting Monday, so I want him to weigh in on the movie "Climates," which he recommended a while back. I have to say I was disappointed in the film, but I'm reserving final judgment. DW has a gift for making me see when I'm dead wrong about something, and I 'm hoping he'll use it now.
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8 comments:
I'll start by saying I found the movie leaden and oppressive. I'm not one of those people who need to feel good after every movie, but if there isn't even a flicker of human warmth in a piece of art, I feel alienated and unable to connect with its "greatness." WIth the possible exception of the female lead, I felt little for the characters. I couldn't relate to their sorrow and loneliness and whatever else was weighing them down because I didn't see any hopefulness in them. Their psychic turmoil felt suffocating and eternal, like the dreary, damp winter in that town. (Maybe that's an achievement of sorts from the filmmamker's point of view). I actually had to leave the theater briefly during the violent sex scene because I experienced it as an attack on my own psyche, on my own notions of what love and sex and human companionship are. I didn't want those images in my head. (But again, maybe that is success in the filmmaker's book).
I was moved by the scene where the female lead held her hands over the male lead's eyes as he was driving the scooter. I thought that was a very powerful statement of who they were and how fucked up their shared life had become.
I didn't like the scenes where the camera lingered close up on a face or an object (a light fixture, for example). It felt manipulative to me, but I could see an argument that the filmmaker was trying to make the audience feel what the characters felt — trapped, obsessed, focused on something unproductive, unable to avert one's gaze.
I think "Blue," where the camera dwelled on Juliette Binoche's grief-stricken face, was a more effective use of this technique.
The ending was intriguing, although I wish it had ended more like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," where the female casts off the chain of the male's inconstancy and realizes once and for all that she's better off without him.
I wasn’t sure if you would like this one on not, kc, which was why I wanted to hear your reaction before I said too much about. Nuri Bilge Ceylan certainly doesn’t expect you to like his character Isa, but it does matter whether you can believe that Bahar—played by Ceylan’s wife Ebru by the way—has gotten deeply emotionally involved with him. He seems like he can be charming when he tries, and he is certainly intense, so I found that bit to be believable. The problem then is that he is utterly self-centered and cannot bring himself to care about others even to the extent of mailing someone a photograph that he promised. So, however it happened, Bahar got entangled with this most unsuitable man. And although she knows the relationship is no good, she finds, like so many people do, the process of extracting herself to be very painful.
Although at the beginning we don’t know all this about Isa. We just know that Bahar is deeply unhappy. I thought those opening scenes where Isa was absorbed in photographing old ruins while Bahar sat up on a hill crying were beautifully effective. The film didn’t just have the extreme close-ups of people that you noted, throughout it made use of limited depth of focus and many times we are looking at one of this couple only to realize that the other is concealed behind. So is this just a case of a couple who tragically fail to see and understand each other? Another stunning scene is where Bahar is on the beach and Isa is playing romantically and burying her in sand. But then suddenly and without any hint of change in him, he buries her face. She sits up in jolt slowly realizing that she was dreaming. Thus we start to see Isa.
I figured you would have a problem with the scene with the former girlfriend. But it is an important scene and I think Ceylan played it right. The coercive seduction is aggressive enough to make us uncomfortable, and the scene drags on long enough to be really uncomfortable. Isa’s only satisfaction is in the conquest, in having his way, in winning. The next time he is at this ex-girlfriend’s house, he rebuffs her advances.
When after months of separation Isa realizes how lonely he is without her, he tracks Bahar down in a remote and snowy mountain village where she is making a TV show. He is no doubt sincere in his desperation and believes his own promises to become the sort of man she deserves. But she cannot let herself believe that. She knows that she is better off without him, but she is far from emotionally free from him. Of the many things that Isa doesn’t realize, one is how much he has hurt her just by showing up again. It is only with great pain that Bahar can send him away and with a hard won determination. She redeems herself, but at a high price. For his part, Isa leaves crushed by defeat. Still not understanding why, he now sees that his future will be one of loneliness.
I was taken by that camera work that you found manipulative, kc. Which is perhaps surprising since I am often annoyed by filmmakers who get too tricky: me have big camera! see what I do! But “Climates” is a film that is slowly absorbed as much as anything. There is little dialog and the basic plot can be summed up in a few brief lines. So these lingering shots and shallow focus put us in a contemplative space that is immersed in these troubled lives. But I can see that it not a space that everyone will find rewarding. Some will find it boring, others pointless. Do you think the key does depend on whether you are sympathetic to Bahar and the depth of her attachment to Isa? The film would be a bit much to endure if you are not.
Oh, nice discussion. Thanks.
Do you think the key does depend on whether you are sympathetic to Bahar and the depth of her attachment to Isa?
Yes, I do. I found Isa so thoroughly repugnant — he's self-centered, empty, joyless, uninteresting, rather cruel — that I had a hard time seeing why Bahar was attached to him at all. The sand scene was powerful, you're right. When it happened, I tasted sand, I felt suffocated. And Bahar realized that this person who professed to love her was actually capable of killing her — at least emotionally — of just sucking her dry with his overwhelming "me-ness." Maybe her blinding him on the scooter was a way of saying "this is how it feels to live with you, you selfish prick," and it was also an indicator of her screwed-up attachment to him.
I like the idea that she knows he is bad for her but she can't shake him. I think that's a very common human dilemma. And it's wrapped up in wanting things to be good and having FAITH that things will be good and wanting to believe people when they tell you they will stop being a fuck-up. When does being generous and forgiving start looking like being stupid and naive? For women there's a thin line between being a saint and being a doormat.
And do you think that was the best way to show that kind of dependence?
I thought at the end that she relented and came to his hotel and then he went off without her. Is that not what happened? Like he made his reconquest and then he didn't really want her anymore.
If I hate anything more than that in men — losing interest after the "conquest" — I can't think of it. Nothing, except sexual aggression, shows a poverty of imagination and empathy like that. Maybe I just needed the male lead to be slightly more likeable.
I wonder what Isa is like in real life.
Oh, also, nice point about not sending the guy the picture. His crumpling up the address was so cynical and cold, and you knew that he NEVER intended to send the picture to the guy, not even when he was taking it and promising to send it. That scene was a real glimpse into his interior emptiness.
What did you make of Bahar "forgetting" the music box at the cafe? Was she making a statement, or did she honestly just forget about it because the gesture of a gift was so meaningless to her at that point?
Did you attach any importance to his lying with his head in an empty drawer? Was that just an inexplicable quirk?
When he was eating those stale pistachios at that woman's apartment, and you could hear him grinding them up (after catching them in his mouth like a trained seal), and he was eyeing her cockily like she was a piece of meat, I wanted to scratch his eyes out! I think I may have an issue with pistachios henceforth.
I agree with you about the scene on the scooter. It seemed to be some sort of mirror of the sand scene where at first it looked like she might be playing at covering his eyes for just a brief moment, and then when she didn’t let go, it became terrifying. I think you pegged exactly why she did it.
There is an ambiguity to the ending. I saw a comment on another blog that also had him leaving her at the end. Without seeing it again, I cannot say too much to help resolve between them. But from their conversations in the cafe and the bus, I thought that she didn’t believe what he was saying and she was telling herself that it would never work out. So I have her leaving the music box deliberately because she recognizes it for what it is: something he picked up almost as an afterthought to use as a tool to try and win her back. So it is not so much a meaningless gift as one with a repugnant meaning.
The blogger who shared your read on the ending also thought that her going to his hotel was her relenting. But I took her to be doing one of those “I shouldn’t be doing this” breakdowns. And then in the morning when they were sitting by the window, she tells about this delightful dream that she had just had that made her feel happy. Isa isn’t able to respond at all. After that, I think Bahar is resolved to have no more backsliding.
This is the only film of his I have seen, but it looks like Ceylan is not at all an expository filmmaker. So while it sort of seems like there should be materials that help show why Isa had such deep hooks in Bahar in the first place, I wonder if this wouldn’t instead weaken the film. You just recently commented that one of the strengths of “Goodnight and Good Luck” is its very tight focus on just the one historical detail without any subplots or romantic backdrops. Likewise, “Climates” is just the disintegration of a relationship in tight focus. We are left to fill in our own assumptions about the prior course of this intense but turbulent interaction.
As for the drawer, funny you bring that up since I was thinking about it this morning before I read your comment. I figured that he suffered from back or neck pain and was trying to stretch it out. But the drawer also has the role of illustration: we could be told that he has pain, but it might not mean much to us since we cannot see it; when we see his head awkwardly in the drawer, we realize that that painful position is less painful for Isa than just lying on the bed. So if Isa has this kind of pain, then he is never comfortable in his own skin.
You mean you wonder what Ceylan is like in real life? I do too. But he must be very unlike Isa. This movie was make by somebody very sensitive to detail and nuance and willing to cast himself as a very unappealing character.
Holy crap! He is an astounding photographer. He has his own Web site. The early photographs, mostly artsy nude women, are not interesting to me, but look at the ones called Turkey Cinemascope. Extremely beautiful.
Damn! I want to go to Turkey now!
Also, good luck in Utah, buddy! Let's have a post when you get back.
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