Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates tackles a perennial theme in art-house cinema, the dissolution of a couple. And like his predecessors who have tread this well worn subject, Ceylan does his best to elide the real reasons behind the break-up. This approach can be welcome in its often behavioral realism, because often at a certain point a relationship falls apart for reasons visible only to its members. Climates begins at the end of the end of a relationship. By the time Isa (Ceylan) takes his girlfriend Bahar (the director’s wife, Ebru Ceylan) on a rare vacation that coincides with research possibilities for his thesis, their relationship is already essentially done. Ceylan devotes most of Climates to the faces of his actors considering their current situations instead of telling us their problems with them, and the opening of the film is a near-wordless and exquisitely directed and acted sequence where Bahar looks upon her significant other for such a long time we can see the dissolution of her love in a single take. Her behavior after this moment inspires Isa to cut their trip short and break up with her, and the film shifts from what was essentially her perspective during the summer vacation to Isa on his own in Istanbul in the rainy autumn, and finally staying with Isa as he tries to track Bahar down in a snowy, mountainous town in the winter.

What Climates does best, but also what regrettably makes it seem somewhat typical if not stale, is how delicately it handles its own sequestering of the reasons behind the fallout between Isa and Bahar. Behavioral details are there, mostly in a paternalistic combination of how much older Isa is and how often he seems to be instructing or nagging Isa, but there is also a mention of an affair of his in the past that has stuck with Bahar. During Isa’s time in alone in Istanbul he briefly starts seeing this old flame Serap (Nazan Kesal) again, and his behavior with her, coupled with an experience running into an old friend, suggests Isa as the kind of person whose relationships are founded on utility, suppressed aggression, and a desire to leave things as they stand. Still, Climates refuses to open the character up, and his behavior can be excused by the very scope of the film, the way it starts at the end of the relationship when everyone involved is irritated, and continues through a time of loneliness, anger, and dissatisfaction. As is often the case with a film that places so much emphasis on the very essence it elides formally, the power, beauty, and freshness of Climates waxes and wanes as it observes Isa doing very little and maybe expressing very much. As such, the middle or autumnal portion of the film is the least effective and quite bland, as Isa’s relationship with Serap seems both too clear-cut and not challenged enough formally by Ceylan’s direction when compared to the ambiguous and delicate handling of the feelings and meetings between him and Bahar. When Isa finally escapes the city to go find Bahar the film alights again and Ceylan’s simple script reveals a profound ambiguity in the final meeting between the two, where who wants what seems far less clear than it ever did before.

Climates is shot digitally mostly in single camera set-ups, though occasionally breaking this editing pattern in order to complicate the film’s varied and subtle points of view and focalization. One monologue seems to be Isa testing outloud a break-up speech for Bahar, but a cut and clever blocking reveal half of the speech-in-the-mind was said right to her; later, the coupling of the two at the end of the movie is rendered highly uncertain due to Ceylan’s fragmentation of space and bodies. This single set-up technique works the best when married to the film’s sound design, which fills off-screen space with bird cries, as well as boat and aircraft noise that often seems to distract a face in close-up to look away from its object of contemplation. Such stylistic nuances—and the occasional and still potent reappearance of Ceylan’s terrific use of foreground and background space from his last film Distant—do their best to raise the film above its sometimes-superficial and sometimes-earnest appearance as a typical art-house study of alienation through lack of communication. Ceylan’s scenario is not fleshed out enough nor is the film’s look potent enough to reach the heights required for such a well-tread topic. But when Climates comes away from its sense of wandering alienation and pursues the ambiguities between its attractive and elusive leads, it attains an emotional delicacy that expresses well the complications below the surface of every relationship.