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Mavi Boncuk |
‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Returns with
Another Masterclass in Conversational Cinema
Cannes: The Turkish master is back, with this uncomfortable
portrait of an overly familiar teacher.
BY SIDDHANT ADLAKHA
MAY 20, 2023
"About Dry Grasses" Cannes
At nearly 200 minutes in length, “About Dry Grasses” (or
“Kuru Otlar Üstüne”) is par for the course for Turkish virtuoso Nuri Bilge
Ceylan. He returns, once again, to the icy frost of his Anatolia-set Palme d’Or
winner “Winter Sleep,” for a story that beats with similar frustrations towards
power in the grand social scheme. However, he weaves this theme into his
background tapestry, favoring instead a talkative and often discomforting tale
of a small-town art teacher, his 12-year-old female student, and an accusation
of impropriety that might be false on its surface, but is rooted in truths the
camera sees.
Where “Winter Sleep” adapted Russian greats like Chekhov and
Dostoyevsky — it draws from both “The Wife” and “The Brothers Karamazov”—
“About Dry Grasses” plays like a spiritual descendant of Nabokov’s “Lolita,” at
least in its use of point-of-view. Ceylan’s novelistic approach to cinema could
perhaps find no more fitting a partner than Nabokov’s lyricism, the kind that
is at once cinematic in spirit, and yet wholly difficult to adapt for the
screen.
Ceylan’s latest takes a similarly imaginative, poetic approach to everything from the dull and mundane to the downright sordid, filtering a distasteful story of a man beset by rural frustrations through a surprisingly personal lens, one that keeps things frequently intriguing, occasionally electric, and altogether challenging. It’s only toward the very end of the movie’s 3 hours and 17 minutes that one feels the weight of its running time, by which point anything approaching emotional oppressiveness becomes added emphasis — an exclamation point at the end of its protagonist’s narcissistic screed.
The first image we see emerging from the empty, frigid white
backdrop is Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), a middle-aged art instructor and part-time
photographer making his way across what feels like a rural wasteland, to begin
his fourth year of compulsory residence teaching rural eighth graders in the
dead of winter. He comes off, at first, like a pleasant, personable, and
new-ish (though not quite “new”) addition to the roster of teachers who have
been around much longer than he has, including his housemate Kenan (Musab
Ekici). Like several of the other faculty, they live in one of the tiny
buildings scattered around the school, while the students pour in from nearby
townships in Eastern Anatolia. One student, the lively, boisterous Sevim (Ece
Bağcı), is Samet’s clear favorite, between the gifts he secretly gives her, and
the fact that he only calls on her and her closest friends to answer questions
in class. If other students dare to point this out, he responds unkindly.
As Sevim, Bağcı is shouldered with the immense challenge of
both playing Samet’s bubbly and eerily two-dimensional conception of her, as
well as a more nuanced and realistic performance the camera captures in
fleeting hints, in the rare moments that depict the psychological impact of
their dynamic, away from Samet’s presence. It’s a mesmerizing performance from
such a young actress, made all the more stunning by her interplay with
Celiloğlu, who whips from charming to fiery and fearsome at a moment’s notice.
However, just as cinematically intriguing is the way Celiloğlu reins in this
part of Samet after letting it fly off the handle, reeling it in and making it
a newfound part of the character’s personality, as if each ferocious outburst
had added a hint of color to his complexion.
Ceylan’s interest lies not in crafting the kind of film
where a teacher outright crosses several lines, but the kind that floats
cautiously along those lines as Samet seems to blur them. As much as “About Dry
Grasses” remains plot-driven in its first half — the length of an average
feature film to begin with — it’s also a detailed portrait of the kind of
person able to skillfully manipulate those around him, while maintaining a safe
level of deniability. In that aforementioned first half, a roundabout
accusation is delivered to Samet through third and fourth parties. He isn’t
familiar with what he’s being accused of, but he fearfully suspects his pet
student may be somehow involved, and he adjusts his behavior towards her
accordingly, punishing her and playing the victim, thus providing a window into
the kind of woe-is-me self-pity that a character of his fragile temperament
might immediately turn to.
However, Ceylan isn’t satisfied with containing Samet and
his existence to this specific scenario. After all, the lives of predators and
victims (and people in general) don’t stop once an accusation arises. From that
point on, just as much of the film is about his and Kenan’s friendship with an
English teacher at a nearby school, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), and the way Samet
perceives their triangular dynamic. Whether or not Samet is a groomer, the
tendencies he displays must surely manifest elsewhere, in different and more
socially acceptable ways — what might that look like?
Ceylan is a master of the lengthy, languid take, wherein the
camera’s steady and suppressed energy — in wide or medium shots — allows for a
skillful and often precise build to moments of passionate exchange. The length
of his shots, going on for several minutes at a time, affords each character
the chance to create a world unto themselves, an opportunity of which Samet
undoubtedly avails.
However, the worlds that clearly exist in the lives of
Nuray, Sevim, Kenan, and so forth are worlds to which the camera does not have
access. It sees hints of other people, but remains trapped by Samet’s purview,
one that takes even Ceylan’s fully-realized aesthetic oscillations — few
filmmakers are better at imbuing the frame with enormity and intensity by
suddenly moving their camera, or cutting quickly from oblique wide shots to stunningly
composed, head-on close ups — and turns them into stylistic capitulations, as
if the film’s very fabric were warping around Samet’s ability to move through
the world as he deems fit.
Of course, Samet is but an extension of Ceylan (and of his
wife and co-writer Ebru Ceylan, and their fellow writing partner Akın Aksu).
Ceylan’s previous works have long featured small-town figures and artists
moving to big cities — a reflection of his own story — but Samet is a former
resident of Istanbul, and the frustrations that inform his uncaring actions are
born at least in part from having had to move away from what he calls
“civilization,” and to a place and people he loathes. Even the intimacy he’s
able to forge with other people ends up wielded like a weapon, and so “About
Dry Grasses” can’t help but feel like Ceylan asking what might become of him if
he, and not some hypothetical person, were thrust into these circumstances.
Like Ceylan, Samet’s keen eye for still photography is
central to his outlook, and the movie takes frequent detours into photo-essay
territory, depicting the way he captures the world around him. The narrative is
so tethered to his perspective, despite its occasional hints of a wider
physical and emotional world, that at one point, it all but loops back on
itself in order to expose its own artifice — a tongue-in-cheek depiction of the
way Samet cloaks and conceals himself around other people, even in moments that
seem genuine and generous. The film positions even the creation of images as an
act of narcissism — introspection in the form of scathing self-critique — but
an act through which fears and frustrations can be easily found, and easily
felt.
To call a work such as this “self-indulgent” would be
nothing if not a compliment, for it embodies the human tendencies of
self-indulgence in a way few others have in recent memory — not the indulgence
of wealth or luxurious opulence, but the indulgences that exist despite their
absence, in towns like the one in which Samet reluctantly finds himself. It’s
about the indulgences of power in minor and corrosive ways, enacted even by
characters whose depth and richness spreads across the screen in vivid hues.
Ceylan’s is the cinema of what’s seen, as well as the cinema
of what one of the film’s own characters rightly calls “beyond the visible,”
when discussing his thoughts on memory and religion. Your mileage may vary, but
“About Dry Grasses” is among the most brilliantly off-putting works to be
featured at Cannes in recent years, with so rotten a core that every hint of
virtue or even normalcy in the camera’s peripheral vision becomes a tragedy
unto itself, simply by way of being ignored.
Rating: B+
“About Dry Grasses” premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film
Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Review
About Dry Grasses review – Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s absorbing
drama of a teacher-pupil crisis
The latest film from the Turkish film-maker is a studied,
Chekhovian film about a schoolteacher accused of abuse by a female student
Peter Bradshaw
Sat 20 May 2023
Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan has delivered another of
his expansive, ruminative and distinctly Chekhovian character-driven dramas.
Again it is spread out across the landscape of western Anatolia, and again
there is Ceylan’s emphasis on still photography and portraiture. This film does
however have one very atypical touch: a very startling and Brechtian
meta-moment when we are reminded this is a film we’re watching, and the tiny
and flickeringly firelit interiors are created on a soundstage.
It certainly does however have a very typical title: that is, forbidding and slightly disconcerting. In About Dry Grasses’s final section, its lead character is to ponder the fact that the gauntly beautiful terrain of Anatolia seems to have only two seasons. The first is the snow-covered winter in which we get Ceylan’s signature shot of a lonely figure plodding towards the camera in the snow. This suddenly gives way to bright summer, ahe ground will reveal itself to be covered in a featureless dry grass, which has a mysterious fascination in its austere beauty.
On the face of it, the film is (yet another) school drama about a teacher whose career is imperilled by a sexual abuse charge from a pupil. Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is a balding teacher at a state school in the remote region who is very candidly bored with everything – or almost everything – and longs for a posting to Istanbul. He is a teacher who prides himself, a bit smugly, on how friendly and approachable he is with the pupils, but is capable of bad-tempered outbursts in which Ceilioglu is very convincing. He shares lodgings with a fellow teacher, the younger and more personable Kenan (Musab Ekici).
Samet has a favourite pupil: Sevim (Ece Bagci) a 14-year-old with whom he has flirtatious banter and sometimes puts his arm round. When a heart-bedecked love letter addressed to Samet is found in Sevim’s exercise book by a member of staff, Sevim is humiliated and tearful and Samet is coldly embarrassed: his warm affection to her is replaced by a wary sense that this is going to get him into trouble.
And so it proves. Sevim comes to his office, the scene of so many inappropriate chats in the past and begs Samet to give the letter back to her; she instantly senses that his patronising claim to have destroyed it is a lie. In that moment, all her feelings for her teacher are transformed into rage, and this is to result in an abuse claim levelled against both Samet and Kenan. The insecure and prickly Samet suspects that it is the more attractive Kenan who is the prime object of these allegations (left unspecified by the school authorities), and this preposterous competitive streak has implications for his budding relationship with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a woman who appears to prefer Kenan.
Life goes on in this place; the investigation into Samet goes on, his tricky and duplicitious friendship with Kenan goes on and so does his chatty, sarky friendship with other people in the village. It all continues without reaching any very sensational endpoint, yet without feeling anticlimactic either. This film, so apparently forbidding and opaque the way many Ceylan films initially are, has in fact something engrossing in its garrulous and wide-ranging quality: a literary quality in fact. Ceylan endows Samet with the qualities of a wryly observant narrator, disillusioned and unsatisfied and yet generous enough in his way.
This is another very absorbing movie from this unique director — a Cannes Palme winner for his film Winter Sleep — who thoroughly deserves his continuing A-list status at Cannes.
‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: An Assured, Strong Cannes Comeback for Nuri Bilge Ceylan [Cannes]
Savina Petkova May 20, 2023
Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a Cannes regular since his debut
short, “Koza,” in 1995. An assured auteur from the very beginning, Ceylan made
a name for Turkey on the festival circuit, and every year he brings a new title
to the Croisette, critics and audiences alike already know what they’re in for.
A staple for aesthetics, length, and dialogue, his films are verbose and
dignified. Protagonists at existential crossroads, revolting against a comfort
they’ve been trying to get accustomed to, a majestic and barren landscape. More
‘man and nature’ than ‘man versus nature,’ he turns an age-old dichotomy into a
persistent, substantial exploration of the human condition through crises big
and small.
This is also true for what is now the director’s ninth feature, “About Dry Grasses,” which already emerged as an early contender for the Palme d’Or. In it, we meet thirty-something-year-old art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) as he nears the end of his mandatory service at a secondary school in a remote village in Eastern Anatolia. This isolated place of staggering beauty — as the film’s opening shot of a snowy panorama testifies — will only contribute to the protagonist’s desire to decorate his emptiness in any way possible. In time, we gather that Samet is an intellectual whose simmering rage against nobody in particular has made him bitter towards people and surroundings. There is something sad about how he rarely lashes out and tries to make himself comfortable; these internal contradictions can come to the fore in longer, wordier conversations, which also have to be philosophically sound. But with whom?
There is Samet’s fellow teacher and roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici), but the full intellectual potential is unlocked with the addition of Nuray (a captivating Merve Dizdar), also a teacher, but in an arguably better school in town. No wonder the three of them form a triangle of bickering companionship — and consequential eroticism — as they try to articulate the depths of their experiences and points of view. Ceylan treats the audience to a slow, steady build-up without the promise that we will get to know what makes each of them tick — not even the protagonist with whom we spent most of the screen time by default. But by foregrounding these interpersonal developments with some contextual scenes of the school activities, environment, and dynamics, “About Dry Grasses” can lift off in its second half.
Samet may seem rather quiet or even shy compared to his other colleagues — withdrawn during recess when everybody else reconvenes — but his idealistic nature finds more hope in the students than in the staff. When we e see him with his favorite student, Sevim (Ece Bagci, who gives a marvelous, nuanced performance), he is excitable, open, and feels important enough to overstep the limits of privacy — a behavior which will not go unnoticed and unpunished. Celiloglu conveys the inner workings of a nihilistic, self-assured man in a polished and intuitive way, more in the way he comes across when speaking. The cadence and the attentive or absent looks reveal more about him than his physical interactions with others.
The script was based on notes that writer Akin Aksu compiled during his mandatory service in Anatolia, who co-wrote the film together with Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his regular collaborator and partner, Ebru Ceylan. Aside from the many quotable lines that ornament the film’s dialogue, “About Dry Grasses” can pride itself on building a livable world beyond its syntactically heavy ethics (a trait which made me dislike Ceylan’s previous film, “The Wild Pear Tree,” immensely). While the Turkish director seems ever-fascinated with gloomy, nihilistic anti-heroes, he does vest more hope in human relationships than usual. Samet is troubled by questions of authenticity and responsibility. Still, more interestingly, he is the one Ceylan protagonist who delves the deepest into the suspicion that perhaps one can only be true to one’s own narrative and not oneself.
Ceylan has always been an analytical director. He likes to construct people, events, and situations, and through this approach, he can finally craft a world where intuition can make its way through the cracks in the rational facade. However frustrated, Samet is a teacher; to be a teacher, you have to believe in the future just enough to do your job. This may be a way out for a weary, misanthropic man to confront his own solipsism in a desert of snow and yellow grass, where the world needs his hope more than he needs it himself. [B+]
‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Delivers a
Pastoral Masterpiece About Turkey’s Contemporary Complexities
Cannes 2023: Ceylan’s wintry mood piece is a stunning
character study of an apathetic man in a country both hopeful and weary
Tomris Laffly | May 19, 2023
To this Turkish critic, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is our Mike Leigh and Anton Chekhov in one, with multilayered characters of social and political complexities engaging through dialogue lines that feel both off-the-cuff and studiously planned in their lavish rhythms. Ceylan is also a master of luxuriously slow cinema with a recognizable visual style, haunting, minimalistic and sneakily riveting across textured, widescreen pastoral scenes and dimly-lit interiors that evolve with peerless patience.
Written by Ceylan, Akin Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, his latest stunner “About Dry Grasses”—Ceylan’s best feature since “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”—flutters with all these pictorial qualities and emotional dispositions. It’s a searing, mesmerizing and unforgettably wintry mood piece and character study that is in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, nearly a decade after his “Winter Sleep” won the Palme d’Or.
It’s also a deeply Turkish film that gently shudders with something specific at a time when Turkey is once again at a political and social crossroads, with an ongoing election that finally threatens the standing of the current conservative government’s two-decade rule, as well as the aftermath of a major earthquake that recently devastated a big portion of the country’s southeast.
That something is an undercurrent of undeniable exhaustion at a national level, a state of Turkish being long in the making, well before the aforesaid election and natural disaster. “The weariness of hope,” one character casually calls it near the end of the film’s runtime of nearly three-and-a-half hours during an escalating quarrel between two intellectuals, a Ceylan mainstay. Indeed, this is a country where almost everyone is tired: those who’ve been stubbornly fighting for the causes they believe in, those who’ve given up on their losing fight, those who’re just trying to get to the next day in one piece, body and soul…
Among the everyday people feeling the fatigue is the perennial burnout Samet (an enigmatic, often aptly prickly Deniz Celiloglu), a cynical elementary school art teacher returning to his tiny, snow-covered village in Eastern Turkey to continue his job after a school break or, let’s say, to conclude it once and for all. With dreams of being transferred to an Istanbul school soon, Samet—the latest addition to Ceylan’s long list of misanthropic men—has been stuck at this recent mandatory post for four years, looking forward to his fast approaching departure.
Our way into Samet’s headspace (and sometimes outright appalling personality) is a faint air of inappropriateness between him and his young student Sevim (Ece Bagci, who should be a star in the making), a bubbly and giggly young girl evidently pleased to be the favorite of the teacher she seems to have a crush on. Samet’s demeanor towards her is just one of those questionable and uncomfortable things the grown-up eye notices quickly—the physical proximity between the two, the innocent enough yet still improper gifts given by Samet, the favoritism he displays in class that crosses a border.
On paper, Samet doesn’t technically commit an offense. But he does shockingly enable and even groom Sevim’s youthful crush on him all the same, for no other reason than to prop up his own bruised ego. He’s bored, isolated and sometimes frighteningly snappy with his students. So the sweet Sevim’s crush amid this nothingness is just a casual toy for him to cruelly play with.
His roommate, Kenan (Musab Ekici), seems more content with his post out East, a remote place challenged by harsh climate and political realities unfairly tough on the region’s Kurdish populations that Kenan doesn’t see as a sacrifice to serve to. The worst instincts in Samet surface through his imagined rivalry with Kenan. When some “inappropriate contact” allegations get made against both of them by unnamed students (thought we know who they are), Samet conveniently defaults into believing that it’s really Kenan that’s dragging him into the mess.
And when the two teachers meet Nuray (an enthralling Merve Dizdar), an educator and lefty artist and activist who’s lost her leg in an explosion, Samet goes out of his way to block her friendship and possible romantic union with Kenan. He can’t stomach that Nuray might see something pure, earned and authentic in Kenan—in short, the qualities he doesn’t lean on as an apathetic individual who complains about everything, but doesn’t care to be the hero to change anything.
While “About Dry Grasses” isn’t a blatantly political film with spelled out partisan sentiments, social, economic, gender, religious and diversity politics are internalized everywhere on its soil, with both vigor and a dry sense of humor. Perhaps the only exception to this is a fiery dinner scene with Nuray and Samet, when she confronts his indifferent attitude with her fighting spirit. “What kind of a man are you?” she demands to know. “What is it that you think you want to contribute to the world once you transfer to Istanbul and take your problems with you?”
It’s an impeccably written and performed quarrel during which a lesser filmmaker would only go as far as applauding Nuray’s courage and scolding Samet’s lack of enthusiasm. But that’s too easy for Ceylan to leave it at that. Because he can write a certain type of self-absorbed and entitled male character so well with both critique and understanding, he makes sure we comprehend the source of Samet’s nihilism at the end of this enthralling sequence, as much as we admire and approve of Nuray’s commendable valour.
Elsewhere, Ceylan nurtures “About Dry Grasses” with artistic touches. Photographic portraits of villagers, poetically shot frosty vistas captured by cinematographers Cevahir Sahin and Kürsat Üresin and talky, richly executed set-pieces with side characters as memorable as the principles deepen his story of those who can use ample doses of hope regardless of how drained they might feel. After all, that might be the only real currency one has left to invest.
‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Pic A
Rewarding Ride Despite Three Hours Of Dense Dialogue – Cannes Film Festival
By Stephanie Bunbury
May 19, 2023
Nuri Bilge Ceylan loves snow. The depths of winter, people in thick coats, frozen taps, the sense that these long, bitterly cold seasons in mountain regions will never end. This is all working material for the Turkish master whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or in 2014. “What am I doing here?” is the regular moan from Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the art teacher in the village school in About Dry Grasses.
Meaning: what is a man of the world doing teaching potato farmers’ children how to draw a horse? Why is he in this desolate country with two seasons that turn over so quickly that once the snow melts, the buried yellow grass almost immediately is turned brown by the fierce summer sun? Even the grass has no chance in life: It’s unbearable. It’s like him, he muses in a rare voice-over, condemned by circumstance to insignificance.
Ceylan explicitly acknowledged Chekhov’s guiding spirit in Winter Sleep. About Dry Grasses catches the same drift of middle-class melancholy. Samet and the other teachers have too little to do, far too much to say and a collective resentment of the fact that they are teachers. Not that Samet does much actual teaching; he stares out of the window, puts the tops back on the felt pens on his desk and occasionally invites Sevim (Ece Bagci), the brightest girl in his class, to answer a random question. His favoritism extends to giving Sevim little gifts, things you can’t get in the village. He lends her books; she comes into his office and giggles with him. The other kids notice, of course. You can see trouble ahead.
Samet shares a house with another teacher, Kenan (Musab Ekici), who is swept up into his wake when someone accuses them both of having touched students inappropriately. The district education director won’t say who accused them or what they are supposed to have done; battling this bureaucracy’s rules is like wrestling with smoke.
Ceylan constructs his own imaginary sliver of a universe over more than three hours of dense dialogue. Whether it’s the teachers squabbling in the staffroom, Samet swapping life advice over whisky with his friend the plumber, Samet talking to himself or Samet and Kenan or both solving the riddles of life with their new friend Nuray (Merve Dizdar), it is through argument that they make sense of the world.
Nuray is introduced to Samet by a mutual friend who thinks they would be a good match; she is an English teacher from another school, a political activist who lost a leg to a suicide bomber during a demonstration and now walks with the help of a prosthetic. She and Kenan clearly are attracted to each other, another reason for Samet to be bitter.
Samet becomes, in fact, an embodiment of bitterness: bowed, glowering and more combative than ever. Even so, he never becomes unsympathetic. The fact that Samet cannot find the significance in the life he has, rather than yearning for another life without lifting a finger to make it happen, is his tragedy. He is, after all, just a human.
Not everyone can stomach hours of verbal sparring, often so frustratingly abstruse that it takes a long time to find the real subject of each conversation. Ceylan’s approach to his staffroom conflict, building it brick by conversational brick, demands close attention and far more patience than many people have in the bank. Even this country, with the white peaks of the Armenian border rising in the distance, is seen through Samet ’s eyes as oppressive rather than grand.
For Ceylan’s many fans, however, this is another opportunity to slip into his world, spot his sly political references and subside for a while into the life of the mind. That life isn’t an easy ride and certainly not too quick, but it is a rewarding one.
Title: About Dry Grasses
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Screenwriters: Erbu Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Akin Aksu
Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Ece Bagci, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici
Running time: 3 hr 17 min
Sales agent: Playtime