Nuri Bilge Ceylan's enigmatically titled film, 'Climates', is quiet, stark, intimate and in places, quite beautifully shot. The story of the breakdown of a relationship, it depicts lives characterised by selfishness, emotional reticence and harshly physical sexual encounters. In spite of these strengths, the film also has weaknesses: the central character, played by the director himself, seems utterly undeserving of our sympathy (beyond the fact of his inner loneliness); and it's always hard to make a film about emotional emptiness without the film itself feeling, in places, slow and empty. This is particularly true of the film's opening, which makes no concessions to the fact that the audience doesn't yet know the characters well enough to be sufficiently interested in the painful detail of their lives. But the end, it has grown to present a certain emotional power of its own. It's always rewarding to see something other than a Hollywood version of the nature of human interaction; but at times, the film wanders, lost like its protagonists.

The middle-aged university teacher has an affair with a younger girl. They are not happy and he acts on the edge of brutality. It all ends, but none of them seem to want that.The camera often stands still and the acting is made mostly by the eyes. It's clever made, a different way of narrating and full of drama.But is this drama through miming and slow-talk enough? It can be, but not really in the hands, or eyes, of these actors. But the task has also been extremely difficult. It takes very much to go through with this. But the film-makers come close. Really close, but anyway, it's all a little rhapsodic.

A self-indulgent art movie about the break-up of a marriage written and directed by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan in which he stars as the husband and his real-life wife Ebru Ceylan appears as the wife who leaves him. Is it therapy or a home-movie for the art house crowd? Or is it an incisive analysis of the things that divide men and women and of how love can come to an end? It improves in the memory if you can divorce yourself from the incestuous feeling that it's just a bit too much like self-abuse and it's certainly bleak enough not to be likable. Likability isn't something Ceylan aspires to. Whether he is 'acting' or playing 'himself' he comes across as a crass egocentric bore; your sympathies lie with the wife, (though initially she, too, seems something of a harridan, her actions at best irrational if not vindicative).The separation occurs reasonably early in the film and then we spend too much time with the self-pitying husband as he tries to figure out his wife's actions. In the meantime he is not above a bit of screwing around himself, cuckolding an old friend. This is a warts-and-all portrait of a marriage, as rough as Strindberg or Albee, and yet it still feels like a vanity project. Woody Allen's movies may be shamelessly autobiographical, certainly in their milieu if not precisely in the literal sense, but Allen is a comic genius who can find humour and absurdity in even the most painful of situations. I worry when a film-maker chooses a subject as obviously close to his heart as this one and then films it with himself as the central character as if it was an observation of 'real life'.On a technical level it is quite masterly with Gokhan Tiryaki's camera luminously observing, often in extreme close-up, the slow and painful death of this relationship and in locations that are far from attractive. This is the first of Ceylan's films that I have seen and their is no doubting his virtuosity. I just wish he had put it to better purpose.

This film, beautiful to see, was a wonderful character study. Slow, but that was part of the charm. Perhaps Bergman inspired some of it. But this was better than Bergman as far as I was concerned. I think it dealt with changing gender relations in current modernizing Turkey as well-- in ways that were not at all simplistic. The metaphor of the seasons behind the narrative is compelling, but does not dominate. The women's characters were well drawn. In some ways, the woman we expect to be the most independent is not completely so. The woman who does achieve independence is remarkably feminine at the same time. So good, I had to see it again. It didn't lose anything at all on second viewing.