Over the past thirty years, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been gaining stature as one of the world’s best living directors. His style features long takes, wide shots, and minimal camera movement. Lately, though, he’s been making what I would simply call “philosophical” films that examine human nature and culture, moral responsibility, the individual versus the mass, and the doubts and inner struggles that human beings always go through. Ceylan is at that stage in the life of some artists when they seek to understand everything.
His latest film is called About Dry Grasses. The title is from a wistful train of thought we hear at the end of the movie. The story takes place at a poor middle school in a rural area of eastern Turkey. It’s winter, and everything is blanketed in deep snow. Samet, played by Deniz Celiloğlu, is a photographer and the school’s art teacher, who was assigned by the government to this remote place four years earlier and is bored and depressed, wishing that he could live and teach in Istanbul.
The opening scenes emphasize the feeling of a closed isolated realm. Simply going from one place to another involves trudging through the sometimes blinding snowdrift. The interiors are small, sometimes dreary. In private homes people gather to drink and have conversations. Ceylan immerses us in this little world, in which we meet Samet’s roommate, also a teacher, named Kenan. Samet expresses more empathy for the kids than Kenan. But suddenly they are both accused, by two girl students, of being inappropriate with them. As it happens, they’re both innocent, but a bit of dishonesty on Samet’s part ends up alienating one of the girls, whom he had previously treated kindly and with some favor.
This is the first plotline. The second involves a woman teacher from another district Samet meets by chance named Nuray, played by Merve Dizdar, whom he suggests to his friend Kenan might be a good match. But when Nuray and Kenan do hit it off, Samet jealously decides that now he’s interested in her.
This story thread culminates in a long and rather amazing argument over dinner between Samet and Nuray, where he defends his detached attitude toward people, while she knocks his arguments down in favor of empathy and involvement, political and otherwise, in the world.
There’s a lot more. This is a three-hour film. One of the most remarkable aspects for me is that you start with a main character that is relatable, and then gradually over the course of the film you find yourself not liking him. Samet is brilliantly conceived—an egotist who has fooled himself into thinking he’s not. Celiloğlu lets you see his character from the inside, so instead of just inspiring contempt he makes us aware of our own human failings, including the little lies we can tell ourselves to get by.
We’re so used to identifying with a main character as a hero that some may react to this with discomfort, but it’s a device that is meaningful in a story where the characters’ motives and ideas about one another are ambiguous, as they so often are in real life. About Dry Grasses quietly shatters pretense, ending with an inspired reverie that holds its characters in compassion.
