With its wintry, rural setting, About Dry Grasses offers the compositional allure to be expected from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Distant), who opens his film with a wide shot of a man being dropped off by a van at the edge of an icy field, his dark figure contrasting starkly against the pale ground and sky. This is Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a middle-school teacher who is bitterly serving out the last year of his assignment at a remote village school. Eager to earn a better post, Samet’s aspirations are cut short when he’s accused of an inappropriate relationship with a student (Ece Bagci). Similar to Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, this is a character portrait of an unlikeable man—though here, Samet (given a veiled dangerousness by Celiloglu) remains stuck in a state of self-delusion until the end. Formally, About Dry Grasses feels less controlled than the other Ceylan features I’ve seen. Those compositions are stunning—including a shot of Samet and a colleague retrieving water from a mountaintop well, which seems to float in the clouds—but there are also uncharacteristic close-ups and even a swish pan or two. Meta touches arrive when the film cuts to widescreen renditions of the portraits Samet takes of villagers with his camera, as well as a bizarre moment in which Samet breaks the fourth wall by opening a door and walking across the soundstage where the film is being shot. Much of this is inscrutable, as are—for me, at least—the occasional, oblique references to the country’s political tensions. Yet there isn’t a boring frame in the film, even when the scenes involve little more than long conversations between two people. One of these is a date, of sorts, Samet has with a teacher from another town, who happens to be a recent amputee. As Nuray, the teacher, Merve Dizdar gives one of those electric supporting performances that threatens to grab the movie from its lead. Nuray has a voracious intelligence that sees through Samet immediately, as well as a woeful weariness in the wake of her injury. As the film’s final moments give way to Samet musing in voiceover, in the manner of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, I wished About Dry Grasses had abandoned him and focused on Nuray’s story instead.
(6/8/2024)
