About Dry Grasses
Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns for his ninth feature, which centres on a schoolteacher accused of abuse by a female student
Impeccably captured against the chilly, rugged beauty of snow-laden Anatolia, About Dry Grasses is another masterclass in deliberate, textured, literary-minded arthouse cinema from Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
This Turkish filmmaker is no stranger to creating intellectually-minded protagonists who elicit conflicting emotions from the audience, and the ambiguous character at the centre of Ceylan's latest film is a doozy. Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) is a disgruntled educator completing the fourth – and he hopes, final – year of a placement at a school in a rural backwater. He is an art teacher and sometimes photographer who cares little for the people eking out an existence around him. He produces vaguely condescending portraits of locals and longs to be in Istanbul. He is prickly and fairly unlikeable even before he and his colleague/roommate, Kenan (Musab Ekici), are accused of inappropriate behaviour by two female students.
Prior to the accusations, Samet is seen being overfamiliar with Sevim (Ece Bağcı), one of his students, to whom he brings a gift from his recent travels and shares a moment of slightly too intimate physical contact. Sevim is subsequently embarrassed when a love letter is confiscated from her bag in class and Samet reads it. She appears to lash out in retaliation by reporting Samet to the headteacher.
This setup might sound like it is laying the groundwork for something salacious or melodramatic, but rather than being seduced by the spectacle, Ceylan is instead more interested in the prevailing bureaucratic morass and moral fallout. The situation becomes the catalyst for foibles and failings to be laid bare – both in Samet’s increasingly unpleasant behaviour towards his class and his spiteful intervention in a burgeoning romance between Kenan and Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a fellow teacher from a nearby town in whom Samet had previously shown little interest.
The About Dry Grasses discourse has been filled with references to the film’s running time, the third consecutive outing in which Ceylan has breached the three-hour mark. He is not making durational work, though. Even when scenes feature glacial, painterly shots of figures engulfed by wide-angle landscapes, how long they last is not their defining attribute. Instead, the pacing of Ceylan's films allows for a more immersive experience of their narratives – akin to entering the world of a slow-burning television programme more than being a film that intentionally draws out its action to emphasise its length. That is the case here, where About Dry Grasses patiently follows the stilted flows and elliptical eddies of its characters’ lives to deepen our understanding of their discontent.
Ceylan draws this out visually, offering just the kind of ravishing imagery we’ve come to expect from the director’s oeuvre, and through a meandering series of conversations that have become equally synonymous with his filmmaking style. These conversations range from innocuous or idle to pointed and political and far from tipping into overly talky territory they feel like rich and necessary excavations of character and milieu. There is even one flourish that feels like something of an outlier in Ceylan’s filmmaking which beautifully combines piercing introspection with Brechtian alienation to disarming effect. This is one of arthouse cinema’s maestros on top form.
Released 26 Jul by Picturehouse; certificate 15