The lovers roam the ruins of an ancient Mediterranean civilization. The remaining pillars and walls of a dead temple support an invisible entablature. One lover, a middle-aged professor, is photographing the columns, which are fluted and topped with convolutes. The other lover is watching the professor from a hilltop. The area around them is arid and the shrubs and grass are dying for water, dying under a sun that burns in the sky like some furious god the temple failed to placate. The lovers are Turkish, they are on vacation, they are failing to save a relationship that is on the verge of ruin.

This is the opening of Climates, a film written and directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant). The movie's story is all about two people: the middle-aged professor, played by Ceylan, and his lover, a young TV producer, played by Ebru Ceylan, who in real life is married to her co-star and director. The TV producer is 27 and the professor is 47. The TV producer feels suffocated by the professor's heavy mood. While resting next to him on a hot beach, she falls asleep and has a terrifying dream: The professor quickly and playfully covers her full body with sand and then suddenly chokes the life out of her. She wakes up, runs into the sea, returns dripping, sits next the professor, and both agree that now is the time to dissolve the relationship. From here on it is no more.

The movie has three stages that correspond with three seasons. It begins with the breakup of the relationship (which occurs at an Aegean resort during the summer); then there's a period of separation and silence (which happens in Istanbul over the autumn), and finally an attempted reunion (which happens in northern Turkey in the dead of winter). That is all that happens, story-wise. But as with all great films, it's not the story itself that matters in Climates; what matters is the approach, the style, the telling—the colors of the clothes and skin, the arrangement of furniture in a room, the rhythm of the editing.

We never learn how the two ever got together, and we can't even imagine that they were once happy and made love with heat and passion. They seem to have always been cold and doomed. And the reason we feel this sense of doom is because the professor is, by nature, not a happy man. Like Baudelaire's dandy, he is "a star that glows with no warmth and is full of melancholy." Men of his profession (or situation) usually find a little happiness in their work, their books and studies; such is not the case with this professor—the mood of his scholarship is no different from the mood of his relationships with women.

The pace of Climates is exquisitely slow. The crucial shots, the ones that move the simple story along, nudge us closer to the final point and consequence of the professor's emotional dilemma—these are given ample space to breathe and reveal their surfaces and their depths: the sweat beading on the burning face of the TV producer; the worn wallpaper behind a queen-sized bed in a tiny hotel room; the black tips of sharp shoes worn by a cosmopolitan woman. The movie ends perfectly, in the snow, on a set for a TV series.

But above this cinematic greatness, Climates is a portrait of the kind of life we must in the end admire and desire. The professor's urbanity, his good taste in clothes and food, his intelligence and sense of freedom—his is the highest mode of existence that any society can provide a human life. He is the point at which history comes to an end. Sure he's a bit sad, and a little indecisive, but that is much better than being poor and oppressed by money or rich and obsessed with money. Nor is he shackled by the empty morals and values of the middle class—wedding rings, home payments, savings, pension accounts. He is not scared of poverty, nor is he dreaming of wealth; he is a global citizen, an international humanist, a man of the world.

charles@thestranger.com