One of the films I saw and enjoyed most at last years’s Toronto Film Festival was Climates, the fourth and latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I had previously seen and enjoyed Ceylan’s first three features, The Small Town (1998), Clouds Of May (2000) and Distant (2003), especially the last, which won the second prize at the Cannes Film Festival and had some theatrical play in the US. In Climates, a man breaks up with his girlfriend but can’t shake her from his mind. He’s an architecture professor unmotivated to finish up his thesis and she’s an art director working in television. She is also about 20 years younger than him. Because Ceylan himself plays the man and his wife Ebru plays the woman, it’s easy to imagine this film, sight unseen, as a cathartic, Bergmanesque exercise in relationship-autobiography. But instead the movie is more distanced and observational, pulling away from (specific) character psychology and heading instead towards evoking a (universal) free-floating existential malaise and alienation reminiscent of Antonioni. The universal quality is underlined by the film’s three-act structure—summer, fall and winter—which echoes the film’s title. Ceylan’s lead characters, both here and in Distant, are photographers, and the best thing about this movie is its impressive visual sense. There’s a pair of love scenes—one of them is animalistic, rough and funny; the other is wispy, oblique and mystical—that is a little tour de force in contrasts. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film that dwells long and patiently on faces; the story of this film is written not in dialogue and not even as much in its mise-en-scene as on these faces. Climates will play from Friday through Tuesday as part of the Emerging Cinema program at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center.