Acclaimed Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan has built a very specific – and Palme d’Or winning – brand over the last decade and a half of extremely slow, long, and talky films, but even he must have stifled a giggle when naming his new one About Dry Grasses. After the more exciting titles of Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Winter Sleep, and The Wild Pear Tree, to set out a stall of mundanity so early takes some real bolshiness, a bolshiness backed up by the fact that this is probably Ceylan’s most exciting film to date. A ridiculously clever and brave story of a sinister teacher in rural Anatolia, it might run at nearly three hours and twenty minutes, but there’s barely a slack moment.
All of Ceylan’s films are, to varying extents, about A Guy Who Sucks, but you’d be hard pressed to find a protagonist that sits on a higher perch of Bellend Mountain than About Dry Grasses’s Samet (Deniz Celiloglu). An art teacher stationed in a remote Anatolian village school with big dreams of being transferred to Istanbul, he’s arrogant, delusional (making constant claims of his own youth that his hairline is just not backing up), manipulative, and has developed an offputtingly familiar relationship, even obsession, with a 12 year old girl in his class, Sevim (Ece Bagci).
It’s this boundary-crossing – maybe not quite at the point of full-blown grooming, but close enough to it that Samet gets visibly jealous when it looks like Sevim might have a boyfriend – that slowly derails Samet’s sense of self, though not quite his actual life or career (Ceylan is clear-eyed about how the establishment closes ranks around issues like this). In lesser hands, three-plus hours in the company of this man would be a nightmare, but Ceylan’s incredible writing and Celiloglu’s breezily excellent performance turns it into a really fascinating character study.
Not many films have the wit or patience to honestly examine how a miserable loser with a little bit of charisma and status actually tackles the obstacles life throws at him, and it’s this tension that keeps About Dry Grasses compelling throughout. It really did feel significantly shorter than the near-200 minute runtime might suggest, even with one hyper-extended political debate scene between Samet and the woman he’s pursuing, Nuray (Merve Dizdar, who won Best Actress for this at last year’s Cannes). In fact, the one real go-for-broke flourish moment that Ceylan allows himself is the one moment that really didn’t work for me, breaking immersion for a very limited return.
Luckily, this is the only stylistic misstep here. Long, winding takes really give us a feel for this village and its surroundings and how they’re all transformed by the seasons – amusingly, About Dry Grasses, mostly set in winter, doesn’t even show us the dry grasses until a summer-set epilogue almost three hours in. Every exterior shot is gorgeous, vast and open, while the more intimate interiors hum with melancholy life. About Dry Grasses is a film about people who are so bored that they’re looking to blow their own lives apart – what an incredible feat from Ceylan that he manages to sell that world without ever being boring himself.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 