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About Dry Grasses’ Review:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Latest Is a Trying Turkish Talkathon With a Few Gripping Highlights
The latest discursive saga from the 2014 Palme d'Or winner
('Winter Sleep') revolves around schoolteachers in a remote rural region.
BY LESLIE FELPERIN
MAY 19, 2023
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan continues to explore his homeland’s teeming dichotomies — city/rural, secularism/faith, individualism/tradition and so forth — in About Dry Grasses, his latest Cannes competition entrant, which revolves around schoolteachers in a remote rural community. Running true to recent form (see 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep and 2018’s Cannes-entrant The Wild Pear Tree), despite the setting in contemporary Anatolia, this latest work nevertheless plays like an adaptation of some lost, weighty 19th-century Russian novel of ideas beloved by mid-20th existentialists and largely forgotten until Ceylan repurposed it.
Of course, that’s not the actual case, and the script was written by Ceylan himself, his wife and frequent collaborator Erbu Ceylan and Akin Aksu. All the same, the screenplay is distinctly opaque, despite the huge chunks of philosophical dialogue and debate it delivers. The film is edited in a seemingly deliberately raggedy style, with sudden abrupt cuts and jarring ellipses. There’s a single, WTF fourth-wall-breaking pseudo-Bertolt Brechtian moment that slides away without explanation, and a ponderous voiceover narration that jumps in at the end to try and create some sense of conclusion.
All that only serves to make it even harder to divine what Ceylan wants us to think of Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the film’s tetchy, highly dislikable schoolteacher anti-hero, who has been posted by the national education system to a remote Eastern village with a large Kurdish subpopulation. Are we to see him as an object of ironic derision with his patronizing attitude toward the locals? (At one point he actually tells a classroom of eighth graders that none of them will ever make interesting art themselves and will spend their lives planting potatoes and sugar beets.) Or are we supposed to see him as the ill-treated victim of minxy schoolgirl Sevim (Ece Bagci), who nearly gets him fired with allegations of inappropriate contact (which, based on the film’s evidence, are perhaps exaggerated but not exactly untrue)? Perhaps we’re meant to choose a little from column A and column B and see Samet as a deeply flawed and fallible figure living in strange times, but viewers’ mileage will vary hugely, and female viewers are likely to read him as a grade-A tool.
At first sight, he’s doesn’t seem that bad as we observe him returning after the winter break for a new semester, bantering with his housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici), also a teacher at the school where Samet works, and their other colleagues before classes start. But there’s something iffy about the way he gives Sevim, a giggly kid and obviously a teacher’s pet, a small present in the corridor on the way to class. During the subsequent lesson, another student calls Samet out for always choosing Sevim and her friend to answer questions in class, but Samet shuts him down.
However, later, when senior staff perform a routine bag check looking for contraband like cigarettes or weapons, an unaddressed love letter is found in Sevim’s bag. Somehow, everyone knows it’s meant to be about Samet, who manages to get the letter back, saying he’ll return it to Sevim. But when she comes asking for it, he pretends he tore it up, a weird power play that the youngster sees right through with her cool, clear, hard stare.
A billet doux that falls into the wrong hands is not the only quasi-19th-century novelettish device on hand here; there’s also a love triangle of sorts — if love isn’t too strong a word for it — that forms between Samet, the more conventional Kenan and a teacher at another school named Nuray (Merve Dizdar, an incandescent presence and the best thing about the film). Samet is set up on a blind date with Nuray but, thinking he’s too good for her because she lost a leg under circumstances explained later, he subtly manipulates the situation so that she and Kenan might get together instead.
But then he finds out that Nuray could easily get herself transferred to Istanbul, the posting of Samet’s dreams, because of her disability. This suddenly makes her much more attractive to Samet, especially since he’s ticked off with Kenan and blames him somehow for everything when both of the young men are accused of inappropriate conduct at work.
Everything comes to a head when Samet manages to block Kenan from coming to a previously discussed group dinner with Nuray and shows up by himself with flowers, intent on seducing her. The scene where they debate activism (Nuray is left-wing; Samet quasi-libertarian or just selfish), community engagement and civics, and the meaning of life is one hell of a bit of dialectical theatre, filmed with verve as the two characters ping-pong opinions back and forth at one another. Nuray clearly has a formidable intellect, but the recent loss of her leg has knocked her confidence hugely and lowered her chances of marriage in what is still an extremely patriarchal society — however much she herself has moved on from such gender-normative thinking. Dizdar’s expressive face shows every passing cloud of thought during the extended, fateful scene, and Celiloglu plays accompaniment for her beautifully throughout. His, too, is a strong performance, even if the character remains, as mentioned previously, a grade-A tool throughout.
After this dramatic high point, the movie goes downhill into predictable territory, finally landing in a soggy quagmire of talkiness and would-be profundity expressed in voiceover at the end. But at least the visuals are nice, with Ceylan’s signature use of snow-capped landscape and wide-angled lensing to the fore.
About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Paints the
Minutiae of Misanthropy on a Vast, Ravishing Canvas
Indulging again in the super-sized runtime of 'Winter Sleep'
and 'The Wild Pear Tree,' the Turkish auteur's ninth feature outdoes both those
films in playfulness of form and richness of feeling.
By Guy Lodge
That talky impulse in particular has become a signature of Ceylan’s filmmaking, to occasionally enervating effect. For all their abundance of lucidly expressed ideas and ideals, his last two films, “The Wild Pear Tree” and the Palme d’Or-winning “Winter Sleep,” couldn’t escape a sense of rhetorical ventriloquism, with the filmmaker placing his own paragraphs of philosophy in his characters’ mouths.
But where those three-hour-plus films were occasionally
essayistic, the similarly super-sized “About Dry Grasses” — a title that sounds
almost self-parodically esoteric, a veritable taunt to Ceylan’s detractors —
feels novelistic in a most nourishing way. Its longueurs unfurl the prickly
desires and discontent of its characters, their circuitous intellectual
arguments born of, and further driving, their tensely fraught relationships. At
197 minutes, the film might be overlong by many viewers’ standards, but it’s by
no means under-filled: By chapters a bristling classroom drama, a provocative
ethics lesson, a bitterly conflicted love triangle and an unsparing anatomy of
an everyday misanthrope, it finds Ceylan’s gifts as a dramatist in their finest
form since 2011’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.”
If there’s some sense here of a single film acting as an
auteur’s greatest-hits collection — no bad thing, when said hits are curated
and sequenced just right — it begins with an establishing shot that just about
any scholar of contemporary art cinema could pick out as Ceylan’s: Against a
sprawling, snow-blanketed slice of the Eastern Anatolian steppes, the camera
watches from afar as a lone, darkly clad figure trudges his way through the
wailing weather, toward his home in a squat little village. This is western
city native Samet’s fourth year of teaching in this harsh locale (a mandatory
assignment under the rigors of the Turkish public education system) and he’s
learned that winter consumes half the year there — just one reason why he’s
restless for a transfer.
At the village elementary school, the outwardly droll,
mild-mannered Samet is popular with his students in a way his dourer colleague
and roommate Kenan (Musab Eki̇ci̇), a local son, can’t quite manage. In
particular, sweet-natured teacher’s
pet Sevim (Ece Bağci,
quite remarkable) nurses an innocent crush on Samet that he humors more than he
should, repeatedly favoring her in class and offering her modest gifts in
recess. But after a love letter from her personal diary is confiscated by
another teacher, a distraught Sevim catches him in the act of reading it; soon
after, a complaint is leveled against him, Kenan and another male teacher of
inappropriate behavior with students.
Though they’re cleared by the education board, the incident
has a souring effect on his classroom temperament, as his bottled-up resentment
of his impoverished assigned district and its grim prospects begins to spill
into both his teaching and his dealings with others. His jovial friendship with
Kenan, too, is set on edge, not least when they both fall for Nuray, a
disabled, sharp-witted teacher at a larger school in the nearest town. As the
three become friends, it’s the better-looking, better-humored Kenan that she
flirts with, but it’s Samet that she understands all too well.
It’s not that Nuray doesn’t entirely share his misgivings
about his purpose in life, as a teacher and as an individual soul — but she
finds a security in community that gives Samet, simultaneously haughty and
lonely, no comfort at all. Their opposite but oddly compatible worldviews
eventually do battle in the aforementioned post-dinner argument. A protracted
but compellingly well-matched intellectual face-off, brilliantly performed by
Celi̇loğlu and Di̇zdar, the scene gradually
accumulates a most unexpected erotic tension — before a radical Brechtian flourish, one that
reorients our entire sense of the film’s
hitherto claustrophobically small, minutely mapped world, takes the film into
more surprising territory still.
This is Ceylan at his most limber and mischievous, the filmmaking exhibiting a generosity and curiosity that belies the script’s defense of individualist, even isolationist, living, at whatever cost to one’s own happiness. The ennui doesn’t all come from the inside — there’s tacit critique, too, of the social and governmental systems that chip away at the energy and ideals of civil servants with something to contribute to their fellow men and vulnerable children alike. And there’s a sliver of a sense that all is not lost for the agonized Samet, hinted at throughout in the beautiful montages of his own still photography — caringly composed images of the surrounding landscapes and faces that he claims to detest — that punctuate the film’s gently rolling acts. Nuray refers at one point to “the weariness of hope,” which rather encapsulates the compromise “About Dry Grasses” offers the unheroic human condition: Better to be weary with hope than with nothing at all.
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Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekicki, Ece Bagci, Erdem Senocak, Yuksel Aksu, Munir Can Cindoruk, Onur Ber Arslanoglu, Yildrim Gucuk, Cengiz Bozkurt,
Production companies: NBC Film, Memento Production,
Komplizen Film
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Screenwriters: Akin Aksu, Erbu Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Co-producers: Alexandre Mallet-Guy, Janine Jackowski, Jonas
Dornbach, Maren Ade, Nadir Operli, Kristina Borjeson, Anthony Muir, Sebastien
Beffa, Olivier Pere, Remi Burah, Mehmet Zahid, Sobaci Carlos, Gerstenhauer
Bettina Ricklefs
Director of photography: Cevahir Sahin, Kursat Uresin
Art director: Meral Aktan
Costume designer: Gulsah Yuksel
Editor: Oguz Atabas, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Casting: Pinar Gok
Sales: Playtime
3 hours 17 minutes