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Istanbul university lecturer Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) and television art director Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) go on holiday to the beach. It emerges that there are problems with their relationship and Isa suggests they split up. He visits an old girlfriend before deciding to see if his relationship with Bahar can be saved.

Climates is Ceylan's follow-up to his critically acclaimed Distant (Uzak) and has been met with equal praise. It was nominated for the Palme D'Or and won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, and was also Time Out Critic's Choice at the London Film Festival. Ceylan returns to his favourite subject, relationships, and what can silently pass between two people. This is the director's forte, to communicate a whole conversation via the close-up of a sideways glance or the way someone smokes a cigarette in another room.

Ceylan personalised Distant by using his own apartment for the setting of a story centred around a photographer and featuring his own mother. In Climates he moves significantly closer to his screenplay by casting himself and his real-life wife as the arguing couple, and his own parents as Isa's mother and father.

This has the effect of making the film a very intense experience, almost claustrophobic. As an onlooker, Ceylan makes us feel voyeuristic and intrusive as we bear witness to Isa and Bahar's slowly dissolving relationship.

Climates is concerned primarily with what is unsaid. Much of Bahar and Isa's feelings are revealed through conversations composed only of a close-up of the eyes or a dip of the head. But there is no turning away. In one scene, Ceylan sits the camera in front of a table where Isa and Bahar are dining with friends. Bahar's sticky mood belies her unhappiness as Isa struggles to lighten the situation. The camera stays fixed in its place as we are forced to endure their bickering.
The intimacy of Ceylan's photography, for instance in the way the camera caresses Bahar, is intrusive and revealing, as if he is using it to try and get under the skin of his characters. Isa is selfish and Bahar is bored, and this seems to be what fascinates Ceylan; how this couple can come to some kind of closure, with or without each other, whilst they harbour such internalised emotion.

"You're not bored are you?" Isa asks Bahar as she watches him take photographs of ancient relics. The camera stays on Bahar's face as it gradually changes from a smile to tears. It's a profound moment and one that captures the situation in a such a simple but effective way. In another scene Ceylan positions the camera behind the couple, Isa in the foreground sitting on the beach and Bahar away from him at the water's edge. Again, it's a refreshingly straightforward staging but one that speaks volumes.

The backdrop to Climates is Ceylan's home town of Istanbul and the Turkish countryside. Like his protagonists, and reflecting the film's title, the drama moves from the searing heat of the beach to the freezing snow-capped mountains the more frosty Isa and Bahar become. It provides the perfect stage for Ceylan's characters who show they are unable to deal with either climate.

Like Mahmut in Distant, Isa is a keen photographer, and Ceylan depicts both in their respective films driving up out of the town to the mountains to take pictures. These emotionally introverted men hide behind the camera, and by repeating the character trait one can't help but see a self-portrait emerge.

Climates contains a very simple premise, that of a love affair gone sour. Ceylan takes this seemingly unremarkable occurrence and dissects it with such profound observation that it becomes compelling without the need for hysterics or elaborate tricks. It is a deeply personal work, an intense study of relationship breakdown sympathetically played out by the director and his wife. It is reflective of Ceylan's talent as a filmmaker that such a full and richly crafted film can capture such aching emptiness.