"About Dry Grasses" -- A Review of the new Nuri Bilge Ceylan Film
The Chekhov of Cinema makes another complex movie about and for adults
Generally speaking, those of us wanting maturer fare in cinema have had to turn mostly beyond American films in the last decade, where juvenile fare totally dominates theaters and the box-office take. We turn to, for example, Eastern Europe, Iran, East Asia, and Turkey.
Of the last, Nuri Bilge Ceylan stands out, certainly one of the greatest film artists alive and working today. His latest, 2023’s “About Dry Grasses,” premieres today on the Criterion Channel, for those of us with no access to film festivals and short-run big-city screenings
No plot description of this movie will suffice, though I’ll briefly try in a couple of paragraphs. The title gives us a poetic vision stating the movie’s ambience: natural, barren, still, solitary.
And that’s what the focus is on: Samet, a middle-aged art teacher stuck in a rural Turkish village, teaching middle-school classes in a harsh winter setting.
When the movie opens, he’s returning to the school after break. We see him walking down a long road in a snowy wasteland. Noticeably, there’s no vehicles. This becomes a thematic concern. It’s a triumph for anybody there to acquire a used car. Otherwise, they are stuck walking.
While the film is mostly set during winter — and this is a major bonus, since Ceylan is possibly the greatest filmmaker ever to shoot in snowy conditions, as this movie attests — the “dry grasses” of the title refers to me to the main character’s plight, his emotions, his bachelorhood, his middle-aged turmoil. All of that will be strongly relatable to Gen-X’ers everywhere. It was to me.
In this realistic drama, Chekovian in the patented Ceylanian way, his life over the span of a few months unfolds before us. He’s dominated by his work at the school. People in the village are trying to set him up. He does go on a date with a female main character, a female Gen-X’er, who lost a leg via military violence.
And one plot point that would seem to dominate, though it’s only featured for a bit in this 190-minute film, much less so than the trailer suggests, is that he’s accused of “inappropriate contact” with students.
This seems plausible to viewers, since in a couple of scenes he seems too cozy with a middle-school female. Then again, we and the school system have nothing to go on. Maybe the students are just using the bureaucracy to get back at him. With this as the most probable likelihood, he feels stuck in a bumpkin town, in a lifeless career, making art occasionally yet rarely exploring his own creativity or anything else, for that matter.
These are Ceylanian concerns — the remote artist whose stuck in a podunk locale, and also is politically and culturally distant. I suggest anybody reading this who has never heard of Ceylan ought to try his “Distant” (titled “Uzak” in Turkish), which will be shorter and more to the point than “About Dry Grasses.” From there, you can move on to his masterpiece in my humble opinion, “Winter Sleep.”
“About Dry Grasses” is his most definitive movie about middle-age yet, complimenting his last movie featuring a young male artist, “The Wild Pear Tree,” and the aforementioned “Winter Sleep” about an older man. All of them are about artists interacting with rural spaces, lost in them, unsure of purpose, sometimes delusional. Out of that, as we see in “Grasses,” poetic art can be created. This happens for Samet. His photographic montages are featured in spots. His memoir, which I take to be the voiceover read near the film’s end, displays his writing.
What the artist struggles with in Ceylan’s movies is how active and politically engaged they ought to be. In “Grasses,” Samet has a long, rich conversation with the leftist Nuray, his blind-date turned friend. She advocates being active, asking him what his “ism” is. His response is a bit cynical, yet reasonable to me. Who can do much in a world of such vast forces? For a modern Turkish man, I imagine (as the movie describes) that this is somewhere between tradition and modern values, between authoritarian government and the notion of “equality.”
Certainly to me, equality has gotten him in some trouble at school! Yet all of the characters have a story about the effect of some kind of military violence on them. Samet’s teaching persona shifts from too comfortable to too brutal, due to the accusations. Neither one seems viable. How should a man like him be in this environment? In any environment?
All is done with realism and subtlety here. Samet and his friend Kenan befriend Nuray, and at points each man feels something for her. Yet this turns out to not be your traditionally overwrought love-triangle. The jealousies are subtle, allowing doubt and paranoia between friends to arise quietly. That’s a key observation in the movie: the barely-noticed social changes that turn high-trust into low-trust, thanks to events like the school accusations, cause personal confusion and identity crises.
Ceylan remains the master of the long-form conversation. At least two of them occur here, over 15 minutes long apiece, allowing a dialogic interaction between the characters to shape our understanding of their complex feelings. Compositions and editing are master-class in what, for American audiences, would seem to be low-key or boring moments. This is humanistic cinema at its finest in 2024.
“About Dry Grasses” ends up mixing teacher-burnout problems with political unrest in Turkey, culture-shock changes and progressive ideals affecting real people, and an artist’s struggle to thrive in all of this dull, wintry mess.
Note: at the 142-minute mark, there’s an odd shot of one of the actors leaving the set, and then walking through the production in back of the camera. I rewatched this three times because it was so jarring. What does it mean? Why is it in here? I don’t currently have a framework for it, other than to think it suggests that the main character’s political uncertainties should be reflected on the movie and the moviemakers themselves. I think the point would’ve been obvious had this shot not been in the movie, but it’s up for debate what this strange moment also could mean.