"Climates" | Subtlety and understatement inform latest Ceylan film

It would be an amusing experiment to send the screenplay of "Climates" to readers at Hollywood studios and see what kind of clueless response it would receive. The fourth film by Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan might look like nothing on the page (at least to those ill-equipped to read between the lines), but in the hands of its creator it becomes one of the most perceptive and turbulent love stories in recent memory.

On its own terms, it's a flawless and fitting follow-up to Ceylan's previous drama "Distant," winner of the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003.

Ceylan is heavily influenced by the intimate, existential films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but on the basis of "Distant" and "Climates," his work is more warmly human, and certainly more accessible. He's not directing people as detached, isolated chess pieces but rather as flesh-and-blood creatures whose hearts endure restless states of solitude. That they don't always find (or even know) what they're looking for makes them all the more human.

And so it is with middle-age professor Isa (played by Ceylan himself) and his younger girlfriend Bahar (Ceylan's off-screen wife, Ebru), who's an art director for a Turkish TV series. When we meet them among photogenic ruins in the film's summery opening scene, it's clear that their relationship is strained, perhaps even broken. We learn more from their silences than any dialogue could ever convey; Ceylan has a directorial confidence that allows us to make logical assumptions based on pregnant pauses in which facial expressions, or the track of a single teardrop, tell us all we need to know.

When their bottled emotions are uncorked over wine with friends, and after a reckless prank on a motor scooter, the relationship is over ... but it's not.

As the title of "Climates" is externally expressed through seasonal patterns of weather, it's internally reflected by the shifting moods of its lovers. Back in Istanbul the following autumn, Isa briefly rekindles a past affair (in a scene as masterfully choreographed as it is quietly amusing). Here again, dissatisfaction is eloquently revealed in a single, all-telling close-up. When Ceylan holds his shots for what occasionally seems like an eternity, we don't feel time pass so much as a kind of telepathic connection to his characters.

Bahar, meanwhile, is on the job in snowy eastern Turkey, probably convinced that Isa is in her past and belongs there. But he returns, pleading to reconcile, and what happens next may lead some to conclude that "Climates" ends where it began. Or maybe it's a new and perhaps even richer phase of love, deepened by experience but not necessarily happier.

When you're reading between the lines, interpretations can change as quickly as the weather.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net