If you love something, let it go, the adage advises, and maybe it will come back to you. Maybe, however, it will go and go and go and never come back, and that, so Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s increasingly lyrical and persuasive “What Remains” would have it, might be its own sort of reclamation. The slowly built, gently revolutionary assertion of this delicate film is that there are some relationships that are stronger and deeper after separation; some lovers who love best with a lot of air and wind between them and you. Perhaps the more space opens up around them, the more affection they generate to fill it.

And perhaps that’s because there are some — you could call them introverts, you could call them solipsists, or you could cut straight to the point and call them writers — who have an essentially solitary streak, no matter how profound and various their attachments to others. Elif (Ökyü Karayel) is one such, a poet of some renown in her native Turkey who has not written a lot recently, or rather, what she has written does not seem to scratch the poet’s itch; whatever creative wellspring she relies on is running dry, its waters coming up sludgy and brackish.

Instead she spends her days feeding the curiosity of her bright, precocious son Selim (Ali Kayra Kul), going on long walks through hilly urban Istanbul, watching over a jar of cocooning butterflies and helping him build Rube Goldberg devices in the living room of their pleasantly bohemian apartment. One room of it has recently been converted into a studio of sorts for her partner Mehmet (Metin Akdülger), an experimental musician who is as likely to want to record the sound of a malfunctioning kitchen appliance as to fix it.

It all builds up a picture of quite a privileged, if hardly lucrative, creative-class lifestyle, and in the early going there is a slight sense that maybe too much of our attention is being lavished on this attractive family unit and their rather wan predicaments. But then Mehmet is let go from his job teaching esoteric music practices to university students and the household’s sole steady source of income is gone. It precipitates an argument between the couple — the whispered-so-as-not-to-wake-the-kid kind — in which Elif’s unhappiness comes out haltingly, inarticulately, and all of Mehmet’s suppressed resentments too, as we finally get some idea of just how dysfunctional they have become. Elif has not showered in weeks and barely eats. Mehmet tries to proffer practical solutions but each one only seems to deepen the rift. “I really didn’t understand the extent of your problem,” he says coolly at one point and Elif recoils as if hit.

Later there is a kind of ceasefire and they make love in the shower into which Mehmet has bodily dragged her. But it is not a reconciliation, it is a farewell — as the next day before daybreak, Elif gets in the car and starts to drive, out of the city into the changing countryside of Turkey, through tunnels and along highways, amid vast empty landscapes and past ancient cities that rise from the plains like the citadels of a fantasy epic. At some point on her hitherto aimless road trip, she realizes where it is she wants to go: to the tiny village in the mountains where her grandmother lived out her days.

This is not an abandonment. An unusual feature of Ustaoğlu’s thoughtful screenplay is that while this type of narrative, especially when it pertains to a woman and doubly so if she’s a mother, is usually full of recrimination, Elif’s escape is not something for which she is forced to sacrifice all else. In particular, she maintains regular contact with her beloved Selim, Facetime-ing him from the road, and stays in touch with Mehmet, who, with seemingly little complaint, has taken over as the day-to-day parent. And when Mehmet’s aging father becomes ill and he takes Selim along with him to look after him, Mehmet himself also goes on a journey of self-discovery as a son, as a father and as the son of a father he loves, but does not wish to emulate.

Gradually, in fact, the harsh judgments we may have laid on Elif loosen their hold and fall away, especially in seeing her interact with three women she meets at different intervals along the way, who are all solitary but not lonely, all in their way, self-sufficient and resourceful. Their kindness and concern for her, their hospitality so lightly given, starts to reflect back on Elif. She visibly relaxes, her face — and Karayel has a beautiful, lucid face on which we read changes of mood the way we read patterns in clouds — loses its tension. It’s all so well and subtly done that we can be tricked into not seeing that this too is some clever scripting: We start to like Elif at almost exactly the same time she starts to like herself.

Against the stunning landscapes of wild, remote Turkey, captured in glorious detail by cinematographer Kiril Prodanov, Elif finds her muse again. In the poem she writes near the end of the film (all Elif’s writings are supplied by celebrated Turkish poet Birhan Keskin), she refers to Mehmet as “my crooked tooth, my friend” with moving gratitude, for all that they have been to each other, but partly, we infer, also for letting all of it go. “What Remains” is a beautifully calm manifesto for the idea that self-acceptance is the primary love without which none of the other loves — of partner, of child, of art, of thy neighbor — is truly possible. But in this unusually even-handed relationship drama, it cuts both ways and both Elif and Mehmet emerge the stronger for it. When you love something, and you let it go, you are also releasing yourself from its grip.