About Dry Grasses poster
The screen is white and still as a sheet of paper. Then come signs of horizontal motion at mid-level as a van crosses the nearly invisible stretch of road before dropping off a man, a tiny figure who grows gradually larger as he walks, and walks, toward the camera through a howling winter wind.
So begins About Dry Grasses, the latest by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Like ‘70s European art house, the story moves at a deliberately slow pace. With no fast editing, the glacial rhythms allow the attentive viewer to contemplate the experience contained within each frame. Like ‘00s Iranian films, About Dry Grasses casts viewers into situations without much context, characters engaged in long conversations that aren’t slices of life but whole chunks. The problem for many viewers is that at three hours and 18 minutes of running time, About Dry Grasses is too long a chunk to swallow.
While it’s commendable in our culturally lazy epoch for a filmmaker to demand the attention of filmgoers, Ceylan could have produced greater impact through condensation—maybe shorter conversations in the shabby town in East Anatolia where most of the story unfolds. The protagonist is the man dropped in the snow by the van, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a schoolteacher. In a Hollywood narrative, he’d be Jimmy Stewart, a nice man beset by problems to overcome. In About Dry Grasses, his multi-layered character is gradually revealed, and when beset by problems, he doesn’t always handle them well.
Samet is an affable companion; he’d like to think of himself as the fair-minded, enlightened teacher of his 8th grade class. After all, he’s an artist. (At several points, the motion picture slows further to a succession of his still images.) But he plays favorites with a girl in his class, Sevim (Ece Bağcı), and while there is no sexual assault, he crosses lines. When caught in an almost Kafkaesque investigation, he takes revenge. Samet is an intellectual, but despite his artist’s eye for composition, he’s emotionally shallow, guided by poor judgement. His disdain for the rural backwater where he’s posted sours into cynicism.
And then there is the one-legged woman he desires, Nuray (Merve Dizdar). She’s a radical socialist who lost her limb when violence erupted at a protest, and she’s still holding out for utopia. One of the film’s central scenes is a philosophical-political dialogue over glasses of wine between Nuray and Samet. She scores many psychological insights. “You blame this place for all of your faults,” Nuray tells him. He’ll carry his faults to his next job in the big city. “You seem to embrace selfishness,” she adds. True enough, but he responds with sharp replies. “Can this wretched world be helped?” Samet wonders. He’s tired of the delusional idealism that becomes the tribalism of its adherents, a reason to sustain their hopeless lives.
Good points from all sides, but again, trim 10 minutes and it would be better still. And then there is the odd scene where Samet walks out of Nuray’s flat and onto a film sound stage—as if to remind everyone that it’s only a movie? The departure through the fourth wall never reemerges or is incorporated meaningfully into the film. A passing thought by the director better left on the cutting room floor? About Dry Grass has several such moments.
What emerges is the atmosphere of life under an authoritarianism not as pervasive as, say, Communist China, but nonetheless real. Army patrols demand to see ID cards. School administrators descend on Samet’s classroom for a pop-up raid, lining the pupils against the wall and seizing … a bracelet and a compact mirror? Samet’s drinking buddy recounts that when he was seven, his father was taken by the police and never seen again. And in the classroom, after Samet turns on Sevim, he becomes a populist bully, a mini-Erdogan, rousing her classmates against her.
About Dry Grasses is screening on Amazon.
