Nuri Bilge Ceylan doesn’t care if you have to pee. One of the most unfortunate symptoms of Hollywood’s misguided fascination with bloated runtimes (a two-plu-hour MCU movie, for instance) is that audiences begin losing their sense of duration as a deliberate cinematic device. For a filmmaker like Ceylan, runtime is everything. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the director’s 2011 feature, is his only film of the past decade to clock in at under three hours. At an imposing three hours and 17 minutes, About Dry Grasses is his longest effort to date, yet at no point does the film feel as if it’s stalling for time. Much like getting lost in a good novel, everything moves with remarkable effortlessness once you’ve been pulled into the film’s orbit. Ceylan allows his characters to organically develop, unravel and transform, crafting an intimate, often darkly humorous epic that utilizes every ounce of its ample runtime to tell a profoundly moving tale of ego and the limitations of misanthropy.
In familiar fashion to Ceylan’s prior work, at least geographically, the film follows Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), a dissatisfied art teacher with a permanent scowl, serving out the remainder of his assignment at a rural middle school in remote Eastern Anatolia. It’s beautiful, but also beautifully boring. After the school year ends, Samet plans to transfer to Istanbul, though his plans are upended when he, as well as fellow teacher and roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici), are accused of inappropriate conduct by two female students, including Sevim (Ece Bağcı), to whom he’d previously shown academic and intellectual favor. Concurrently, both men meet Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a fellow teacher in a nearby town who previously lost her leg in a terrorist explosion. Kenan and Nuray begin a tentative romance, sending Samet into a destructive spiral of self-loathing and jealousy, which impacts both his professional and personal life. He’s obsessed, but why?
Part of the great pleasure in Grasses is how the narrative develops out of the characters’ actions and emotions rather than any sort of extraneous force. Like a butterfly emerging slowly from a cocoon, it takes a long time for the story to come into focus. When it does, it’s more colorful and intricate than you could’ve possibly imagined. In a potentially risky move, Ceylan dares the audience to identify with a profoundly unlikeable character. Samet is increasingly spiteful and selfish, acting with malice against the best interests of himself and others; it’s to Ceylan’s immense credit that he’s not only fascinating to watch, but even partially empathetic by film’s end. You don’t have to like a character to see them as a human being. In fact, Samet’s reawakening, if there even is one, works as well as it does only because the film insists on exploring him without an excess of authorial judgement. When we do break away from this immersion, for beguiling fourth-wall-breaking moment, the result is both hilarious and illuminating. It’s hard to hate a character whose worst enemy is themself.
As with any character-driven film of this length, the performances carry as much as the visuals. Dizdar, who won Best Actress at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for her performance, brings an astonishingly reserved but rebellious energy to the character of Nuray, who is arguably the heart of the film amid a sea of unlikeable twerps. A standout sequence features Nuray and Samet having a tense political debate over dinner, which goes deep into the ideological divides that exist in contemporary Turkey, and whether it’s better to be passionate or to not care at all. It’s riveting stuff, though something you’d probably never see in a more mainstream work, since it asks the audience to exist with the characters and their concerns outside of the limited framework of their own experience. As the precocious but vulnerable Sevim, Bağcı gives one of the best child performances in recent memory, also providing a beacon of hope for our protagonist’s suffocating miserabilism. It’s a warts-and-all experience, occasionally dark, but never less than profoundly honest in how it portrays its characters conflicting motivations and ambitions.
For its many intersecting themes of middle age, personal crisis, idealism and political turmoil, About Dry Grasses is often mesmerizing simply for its atmosphere. Shot on ultra-wide anamorphic lenses, each frame is painterly in its composition, often lingering for minutes at a time to capture actions from afar. The landscape of Eastern Anatolia is just as important to the story as the characters themselves. Many of the emotions that Ceylan’s characters express can be physically transposed onto the beautiful but bleak landscape that surrounds them, one that feels hypnotic and inescapable all at once.
The opening shot, alone, of a shuttle dropping off Samet, introduces us to the character by drowning him in a thick blanket of white snow. The sky is the same color as the ice, a blinding monochrome pale that swallows up everything in its path. In places like these, small rooms become worlds of their own, in which individuals must imagine and forge their own desires. Ceylan returns repeatedly to these habitats, whether it be Samet’s classroom, the cottage he shares with Kenan, or the dingy, smoke-filled shed where he and a few of the men go to drink after dark. Everything has character, and no detail is too minor. Samet is a photographer, again a small detail, but it lends to one of the film’s most meaningful motifs. Early on, he photographs inhabitants of the town, and we’re treated to a montage of tableaux vivants, which convey a transfixing resilience to the landscape around them, but also an unknowability that Samet must accept in order to exist with any sort of happiness. Misanthropy exists here, but so does hope. At some point, spring will come.
Photo courtesy of Sideshow / Janus Films
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