About Dry Grasses
Kuru Otlar Üstüne

The latest from Turkish writer, director, and photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) is another wonderfully bleak and ponderous meditation on life and how disappointing we humans can be. Drawing us in with his expansive vistas and impressively composed interiors, mostly shot in long, deliberate takes, Ceylan and his two cinematographers make the little remote village in Eastern Anatolia where the story takes place—an area that everyone complains has only frozen winters and arid summers—into a setting in which we'll gladly spend 197 minutes with a misanthropic protagonist.

Deniz Celiloğlu stars as Samet, a young teacher who hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after completing his years of mandatory service in an isolated rural school teaching art to the "future beet farmers" of his nation. Like Haluk Bilginer's mountaintop hotelier in Ceylan's Palme d'Or winning Winter Sleep, Samet seems like a pleasant enough fellow at the start of the picture. He's affable with his students and cordial with his colleagues, especially his housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici), but after a love note is confiscated from his favorite student during a routine classroom search, Samet and Kenan get into some mildly hot water with the head of the school. This bureaucratic run-around doesn't seem like all that much of an inconvenience, but Samet takes it as an affront on multiple levels.

The film captures a type of quintessentially male bitterness and disappointment in all of humanity that comes about when fragile men discover they're not revered to the extent they deem appropriate. Though he seems to face very few consequences for any of his actions, once Samet feels he has been wronged, he cannot let it go. But this is not a one-note character study. Within Samet's unpredictable personality reside enough narrative twists and turns to sustain a film with a 3+ hour runtime. It helps that the small handful of other actors who populate the picture create such compelling personalities. This is the case even when they have very little dialogue, like Ece Bağcı, who plays Sevim, the coy teacher's pet. The most compelling co-star is Merve Dizdar, who plays Nuray, an English teacher from a neighboring village who lost a leg to a terrorist explosion before Samet meets her. The politically passionate Nuray's relationships with both Samet and Kenan provide the film with its most fascinating relational dynamics.

Typical of Ceylan's movies, About Dry Grasses consists of long, quiet passages interspersed with intense conversations in which the characters engage in philosophical and existential discussions as well as heated, confrontational arguments. These complex dialogues come courtesy of a terrific script by the director, his wife and frequent collaborator Ebru Ceylan, and Akın Aksu, with whom they co-wrote the 2018 film The Wild Pear Tree. As with Pear Tree and Winter Sleep, the slow progression of time and the fascinating way the verbose, cerebral exchanges pull the viewer in, creating an almost hypnotic state. That spell gets shattered at one point to remind us that we're watching a film and not real life. I'm unclear as to why the filmmakers would smash the illusion they've crafted so effectively other than to arrogantly point out how deeply they've pulled us in—or maybe to wake up anyone in the audience who may have nodded off. For me, though, this fourth wall breaking prevents the excellent film from achieving greatness.