Among the less heralded showings at the 44th New York Film Festival, Climates/Iklimler is an emotionally true and devastating rendering of love gone stale. Some viewers complained afterwards of shallowness and Eastern European filmmakers’ excessive love for drawn-out static shots of faces. But that is to miss the point, for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s thesis is precisely that motivation is too hidden to mirror or to know, even for the very individuals in question, and that things go badly or, less often, well, in spite of circumstance or the best intentions in the world.

Sweat-beading heat on an Aegean beach or amidst dry ruins, or fat snowflakes near Ararat and Armenia in northeast Turkey, might seem to function as easy metaphor for hot and then cooled passion. But isolated outside sounds of wind, waves or drips or raindrops, insect buzzes and dogs’ barks, the cracking of small nuts and crunch of footfalls, indicate that the external is a constant, neither hostile nor benign nor indifferent, that nature is simply the arena but in no wise a causal agent.

The relationship is gone from before the beginning, before a tear runs down a woman’s cheek on a barren hill above her partner photographing Roman columns for his classes and dissertation research. Something is sensed over supper with married friends (Arif Asçi as Arif, Semra Yilmaz as Semra). Something is missing, at the ruins, at the hotel, on the beach, but we can't  articulate it until, after “I love you,” he suggests that they remain “good friends, still go to dinner, movies together . . . [but] maybe go our own ways for a while.”

Her lazy beach daydream-turned-nightmare of his burying her in the sand, first the body then the head, has prefigured what both knew but wouldn’t put into words. The truth at last breathed, she causes a dangerous motor scooter accident and walks away hysterical but has regained self-control by the time; with clumsy concern, he accompanies her to the overnight bus to Istanbul.

The story does not reveal their seemingly stable past, nor is it concerned with the reasons for its withering. In some circles, psychiatrists would be called in, but this realistic tale refuses that route.

The forty-seven-year-old director’s thirty-year-old wife Ebru plays the thirtyish woman Bahar to his fortyish university professor Isa. He a bit disheveled and darkly good-looking, she beautiful and fragile inside translucent skin, they have been together long enough to be identified as a couple by coworkers and friends. But even couples are lonely here.

Back in Istanbul, Isa catalogues slides and gives classes and exams, visits his mother and father (Fatma and M. Emin Ceylan; the director usually casts his family members) to have trousers hemmed and deny that he is ready to settle down and have children. Drifting, really, in the rain of winter, he drops in on a former girlfriend (Serap, played by Nazan Kesal) whom he had bumped into with her husband (Güven, by Can Özbatur) and whom he forces into sex sooner than she had flirtatiously planned. During their liaison, he learns that, with occasional returns to the city, television producer Bahar is steadily working on a series at the remote other end of the country.

Instead of an announced trip to warm places, Isa flies east, buys a gift plastic music box, observes his ex-love on the snowy set, and surprises her in the village. Over hot tea, they talk, and though Bahar pleads a completely full schedule, he comes to her again and, between interruptions in a crew van, affirms that he no longer values the material and is “ready to change . . . get married, have kids, even leave Istanbul.”

Visibly upset, and against the audience’s hopes, Bahar  will come to him, open and vulnerable, but the moment has been lost -- or never was. Girlishly, she recounts a love-dream of flying and of seeing her mother, but he is not listening anymore and offers to buy breakfast on her way to work and his to the airport.

This, Ceylan’s first high-definition film, does not give answers; indeed, does not even ask, Why? Isa bears out the Elizabethan conceit that a man wants the woman he cannot have until he has her. Like himself, however, his egotism is lost and lonely, and he is not a philandering cad in the vein of Michael Caine’s definitive Alfie. No less achingly than Bahar, Isa is fragile, overwhelmed by complexities of a life that lie too deep for tears or men’s language. Pity for her, pity for him, and love in the director’s dedication “For My Son Ayza.” 

(Released by Zeitgeist Films; not rated by MPAA.)