THERE is a scene in the new film from Nuri Bilge Ceylan when Isa, the man at the centre of the story, is taking pictures on a trip in the snowy mountains near Istanbul.

He is a doleful photographer with a pelt of stubble on his face and is played by the director himself. He squares up to take a photograph of a citadel in the hills, and asks his taxi driver a little tiredly to stand in the foreground of the picture.

"It would be nice to get someone in a picture for a change, " he says.

But he then instructs him not to smile. It's a moment that expresses the icy heart of Climates, the shivering lack of emotion, and the style of this Turkish director, who makes high arthouse films that graft the poetic neo-realism of Abbas Kiarostami with the emotional isolation of Michelangelo Antonioni. Ceylan's films, however, are his own, and they drill through human sadness with diamond-tipped precision.

Climates is a film about the break-up of a marriage and its possible reunion - and there's very little smiling in it. In fact, it's full of Distant (Uzak) - one of the better European films of many a year - it is stirring and profound, the study of a man entombed in his own isolation and depression.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his reallife wife play a couple at the wrong end of their marriage. We first see them on holidays in the sunny ruins of Kas. He wanders around taking photos of pillars, while Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) sits on a hill watching him, slowly succumbing to tears. She still loves him but yearns for some affection. But something died inside this man a long time ago.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a little more amateurish an actor than Muzaffer Ozdemir, who anchored Uzak with an extraordinary delicacy of expression. But Ebru Ceylan can command long moments in front of the camera, a small change of facial expression mapping out an entire future. On the beach, she dreams of him playing with her in the sand, but it soon turns to a nightmare - Ceylan contrives a horrid image of Isa smothering her in sand. When she wakes up, Isa, who is sitting beside her, rebukes her for falling asleep in the sun.

As the relationship sours, Ceylan frames them on opposite sides of the screen - they cease to share the same emotional space.

Then Isa soon announces their break-up with dreary formality:

"The age difference has really become a problem, " he deadpans.

The soundtrack shimmers with heightened sound - a cock crowing, the turn of the tide, a buzzing fly. In Climates, misery is just a humdrum part of life. Summer turns to dreary autumn and Isa wanders Istanbul alone in the rain.

He stalks Serap, the lover of an old friend of his, and they have violent, animalistic sex on the wooden floor of her apartment. It is conducted with coldness and comic self-loathing. When Serap mentions that Bahar is working on a television shoot in the mountains, Isa loses interest very quickly.

Occasionally, the banal seriousness is sliced open with moments of droll comedy: Isa tells a friend he has always wanted to go on holidays on his own and thumbs a sunholiday brochure. We then see him landing in a part of Turkey buried in snow - he is planning to tell Bahar that he has changed. But when his big moment comes inside a work van, and he tells her in the same drained voice which suggests nothing has really changed at all, Ceylan mocks the moment.

He has a TV crew load equipment into the vehicle, reopening and closing its doors. Isa's solemnity is shattered. In Ceylan's films, the world couldn't give a damn about individual suffering.

Isa is a man begrudging of the company of others, but incapable of being happy on his own. Ceylan, who is also a well-regarded photographer, has an electrifying gift for deep-focus composition that singles out these kind of men and their aching melancholy. They do not have words to explain what they are feeling because they are incapable of expressing it, and Ceylan's camera captures every flicker of frustration.

Their bottled-up nature brings to mind the fool's description of the tragic circus performer Zampano in Fellini's La Strada:

"He's like a dog. Dogs look at us wanting to talk but bark instead."