Does cinema burden any landscape with as much sorrow as Anatolia? For decades the vast spaces of central Turkey have been used as sites of lassitude and lost dreams, either a crushing place of exile or a life-sentence of inescapable dead ends for those unlucky to be born there. With masterworks like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep and The Wild Pear Tree, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has significantly contributed to this concept, pushed even further by his long-awaited About Dry Grasses. It’s a film with the auteur’s unmistakable touch, both visually – though it’s his first time collaborating with these two d.o.p.s – and thematically with long, indeed very long conversations that directly and circuitously touch on desiccated expectations, personal responsibility in a blighted world, and withered social relations. About Dry Grasses is about many things, and while being, as ever, intellectually rigorous, it largely lacks the well-earned emotional gifts of his most recent titles, notwithstanding an award-worthy performance by Merve Dizdar as the film’s sole completely sympathetic figure. Even more talky than The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan’s latest won’t earn the director new fans but it’s an engrossing addition to his heavy-bodied corpus.
We know we’re unmistakably in Ceylan territory from the opening shot, of a landscape made all but formless by heavy snowfall through which Samet (Deniz Celiloglu, Siren’s Call) returns from winter break to the village where he’s been teaching art for three-and-a-half years. He’s not there by choice: in six months he’s hoping to transfer to Istanbul, but for now he needs to complete a term that feels more like a jail sentence. Ceylan took a risk by making such a thoroughly unpleasant man his protagonist, though there are moments where we glimpse the remains of a potentially more sympathetic side, now largely atrophied. He’s the worst kind of teacher, uninspiring, discouraging creativity – he berates his pupils for wanting to draw things they’ve never seen – and openly choosing favorites. The latter is embodied by Sevim (Ece Bagci), a giggly pubescent goody-goody with a hint of the Lolita about her who’s enjoying Samet’s attentions, from secret gifts to his arm around her waist.
Samet bides his time waiting to escape this forsaken land, so when he meets Nuray (Merve Dizdar) an English teacher in the nearby town, he’s not especially interested in pursuing a relationship since he’s convinced he’ll be transferring soon. That changes when he brings his colleague and housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici) with him on a date and sees a spark between the two. The scene is terrifically handled, with Samet making loud clinking sounds with his tea glass and spoon both to return the focus on him and express his annoyance. A supreme narcissist, he can’t abide anyone getting something he doesn’t have, and he’s not above sabotage to ensure he remains on top.
His sense of superiority to his surroundings also means he needs to feel powerful, so when he and Kenan are called before the regional Director of Education (Yildirim Gücük) because of reports of inappropriate contact with students, he goes into bullying mode to find out who made the allegations. Once Samet realizes it was Seyim, his anger boils over in class where he scornfully mocks the students, telling them they’ll never be artists: “You’ll plant potatoes and sugar beets, that’s it.”
The power games Samet plays are fascinating to watch because his passive-aggressive battle plans are so subtly done, embodying an early line when a fellow teacher says it’s possible to tell a big lie by first admitting a small truth. He’s an intimidating sophist, skilled in manipulation, but he’s not prepared for Nuray’s openness and honesty. She’s one of the finest female characters in any of Ceylan’s films, and the one figure who offers hope for the future of Anatolia as well as the country. Though she’s from the region, Nuray spent time in Ankara where she moved in leftist political circles until a suicide bomber’s explosion blew off one leg. Thanks to a prosthetic her disability is barely noticeable, though it allows her to forgo the usual teacher requirement of spending four years in the provinces; she’s back in the area to be with her parents and take stock of her options, so she’s tentatively eyeing out Samet and Kenan to see if they might be suitable partners.
The dialogue-heavy script by the director and his usual collaborators, wife Ebru Ceylan and Akin Aksu, features multiple scenes in which lengthy conversations behave like breathtaking aerial battles, but the undisputed highlight is a dinner sequence with Nuray and Samet where the discourse delves into politics and the individual’s responsibility to society. The performances are riveting and the points scored make one want to re-watch the scene multiple times to fully appreciate not just what’s said but how it’s all constructed, and yet unlike the extraordinary extended conversation between two imams in The Wild Pear Tree, the discussion takes place at a table, so the emotional rewards from the earlier film’s marriage of speech, movement and landscape are absent. It’s intellectually stimulating but not moving, which can be said for much of About Dry Grasses.
There is however a tremendous surprise within the scene, one that thrills with its audacity and acts as a welcome pause in the dialogue, allowing both characters and the audience to refresh for a moment. Apart from this interlude, the film largely consists of long, discreet takes occasionally interrupted by montages of the director’s own stunning photographs that are meant to be Samet’s, though the art teacher is only interested in people as conquests whereas Ceylan’s portraits are generous poems to the individuals portrayed. The three-plus hours end amidst the ancient Commagenean ruins of Mount Nemrut, sun-baked and, apart from Samet, Nuray and Kenan, devoid of visitors: a “land of unending setbacks,” the physical manifestation of the desert inside.
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Screenplay: Akin Aksu, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici, Ece Bagci, Erdem Senocak, Yüksel Aksu, Münir Can Cindoruk, Onur Berk Arslanoglu, Yildirim Gücük, Cengiz Bozkurt, S. Emrah Özdemir, Elif Ürse, Elit Andaç Çam, Nalan Kuruçim, Ferhat Akgün, Eylem Canpolat
Co-producers: Alexandre Mallet-Guy, Janine Jackowski, Jonas Dornbach, Maren Ade, Nadir Öperli, Kristina Börjeson, Anthony Muir, Sébastien Beffa, Olivier Père, Rémi Burah, Mehmet Zahid Sobaci, Carlos Gerstenhauer, Bettina Ricklefs
Executive producer: Mediha Didem Türemen
Cinematography: Cevahir Sahin, Kürsat Üresin
Production designer: Meral Aktan
Costume designer: Gülsah Yüksel
Editing: Oguz Atabas, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Music: Philip Timofeyev, Giuseppe Verdi
Sound: Fatih Aydogdu, Clément Laforce
Production companies: NBC Film (Turkey), Memento Production (France), Komplizen Film (Germany), Second Land (Sweden), Film i Väst (Sweden), Art France Cinéma (France), Bayerischer Rundfunk (Germany), TRT Sinema (Turkey), Playtime (France)
World sales: Playtime
Venue: Cannes (Competition)
In Turkish
197 minutes
