About Dry Grasses

 Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2023 film, About Dry Grasses poses this question:  Can a film sustain interest for 197 minutes when it's subject is a whining, self-centered asshole?  Ceylan is an important film-maker and there is much to admire in About Dry Grasses, but, on the whole, the project seems misguided.  The picture's hero (better said "protagonist"), Samet, is a schoolteacher who is too lazy to teach, a bad friend, selfish, and a caddish, indifferent lover.  The film explores some of the same bleak subjects featured in Antonioni films, but those movies are all at least one-hour shorter that Ceylan's epically proportioned essay in alienation and ennui.  Ultimately, beautiful film-making, superb acting, and fascinating locations are insufficient to elevate this film above mediocrity -- whatever it has to say could be said in ninety minutes.  But with a picture of this sort, one of the esthetic strategies is that extreme length and immersion in the dark waters of this movie for more than three hours does result in a sort of pay-off, although I think it is largely specious, more a product of the viewer's endurance than what we see on screen.

Samet has been teaching for four years in Eastern Anatolia.  For the film's first three-hours, the screen shows nothing but dim enclosed spaces, most of them crammed with junk, and vast empty tundra covered with dunes of snow.  I have never seen a movie so incessantly and relentlessly cold.  It seems to be snowing in every exterior shot and the accumulations of the stuff as shown in images of villages result in huge piles of ice and tunnel-like paths that cut through the white wasteland.  (The movie was shot in Erzuram and Adiyaman provinces -- these are largely Kurdish-speaking enclaves on the border with Armenia.  In fact, Erzuram, a big city, was once an Armenian capital.  The spectacularly wintry landscapes will be familiar to readers of Orhan Pamuk's Kar -- that is, "Snow" -- set in an adjacent area near the border with Armenia.)  This place is about as far away from Mediterranean Istanbul than can be imagined and Samet years for an assignment in the big city.  

Samet sort of teaches art, although his style of pedagogy tends toward telling the eighth-grade kids to draw something and, then, ignoring them.  (He posts an image for them to copy but can be persuaded to let them draw anything they want.)  After a complaint from some students sours him on the class, he simply sits at his desk sulking.  At one point, he writes the word "Perspektiv" on the chalk board with a Turkish phrase underneath but can't be bothered to explain what this means and ends up in futile argument with one of the boys about whether they are supposed copy into their notebook the word "Perspektiv" or the Turkish phrase below.  True to form, at the end of the movie, he has to be implored to turn in his grades.  None of the teachers in the school seem particularly motivated.  It's located in a small village, apparently one of six or seven hamlets scattered around a snowy plateau under some imposing mountains that are almost never visible.  The place seems depressed but not picturesquely poor -- it's just unpleasant.  We see a lot of bitching in the Faculty Lounge and snarky backbiting among the other teachers all of whom would rather be somewhere else.  Samet lives in a rented house with Kenan, another male teacher who is a social studies instructor.  Not much really happens.  The snow falls; everyone drinks gallons of reddish "weak tea" full of sugar.  The characters wander around in the blizzard or drive on narrow roads covered with snow and ice.  They're all somewhat unhappy, but no one seems desperate -- they are just mildly depressed and indolent.  

The principal action in the film's first half is a complaint made against both Kenan and the protagonist Samet about excessive familiarity with two girls in their classes.  Samet is flirting with the fourteen-year old Sevim.  (She's more or less the dominant partner in the relationship.)  When the principal searches the kid's backpacks and desks -- apparently, this kind of thing is common in Turkish schools -- a love letter written by Sevim is found.  The other students in the class, particularly the boys, resent the fact that Samet always calls on Sevim and her friends to answer questions -- he overtly favors the girl.  It's not clear what's in the love letter, but the film implies that Samet thinks it was supposed to be sent to him.  Later, a shot suggests that Sevim wrote the letter to an older boy with whom we see her plotting.  In any event, there's an accusation made by someone (the protocol is that complaints of this sort are kept anonymous) that Samet and Kenan are getting too friendly with the little girls.  In this part of the world, accusations of this sort can lead to assassination or lynching.  So the Superintendent summons Samet and Kenan and orders them to knock it off.  They are expressly told not to try to figure out who made the complaint.  But Samet, who is always insubordinate, sulks and berates his students and does everything in his power to figure out who ratted him out.  He confronts Sevim directly and humiliates her by making her stand outside in the hall during his class.  Remarkably, there's no real follow-through by the administrators; everyone is too dispirited by the perpetual blizzard to do anything to discipline Samet.  

The second half of the film involves a young woman named Nuray who has lost a leg in a terrorist (suicide) bombing.  Samet meets her for lunch and expresses some lackluster interest in  her.  When she seems to respond, he tries to foist her off on the lonely Kenan.  (Kenan comes from a sheepherding family up in the mountains and says that he would be happier tending his flocks than teaching in this "hellhole.")  Kenan expresses some interest in Nuray.  As soon as Kenan starts to like the girl (she's an English teacher at a larger "magnet" school on the steppe), Samet woos her again.  She invites Samet and Kenan, who she seems to like, to visit her at her parent's house.  (Like Kenan, she is an Alawi Muslim, a syncretist Islamic sect regarded as heretical by orthodox Muslims; their beliefs are secret and not well understood.  Politically, like the similar Alevis, they tend to be Leftists, the case in this film).  Samet tromps through the blizzard to visit Nuray, but has neglected to inform Kenan of the dinner party.  A long colloquy ensues between Nuray and Samet.  She accuses him of selfishness and nihilism.  He says that she is naive and foolish.  The half-hour scene involves an intensely argued debate about whether people should be politically engaged and fight for a better world.  Nuray asserts that values of solidarity, resistance, and political commitment are necessary to a decent life.  Samet argues to the contrary.  They both get drunk and it's pretty obvious what will inevitably happen.  Weeping, Nuray goes into her bedroom, disrobes, and removes her prosthetic leg.  Samet gets into bed with her.  In the morning, Nuray asks Samet to not tell Kenan.  It's apparent that she likes Kenan better than Samet and that her relationship with Samet was wholly disposable -- she just wanted to prove that she could attract a man and have sex with him notwithstanding her injuries.  (The movie is very elliptical -- this is my interpretation; others might perceive this differently.)  Samet goes home and  immediately boasts to Kenan about seducing Nuray.  Kenan is very hurt.  Later, Nuray comes to the house where the two bachelors live and confronts Samet, showing renewed interest in Kenan.  There's a quarrel and she storms out into the perpetual blizzard only to return sheepishly a few minutes later -- the snow is too intimidating for her to make her way home alone.  We see the three figures in her car, snow almost whiting-out the way forward on the road.  The falling snow turns to grass in a dissolve effect.  It's now late Spring.  The village is revealed to be surrounded by watery lagoons, marshes, and little creeks.  School is about to be let out for the Summer.  Samet has been transferred to another assignment. Little Sevim comes to see him and, obliquely, apologizes.  Samet continues to sulk.  (The little girl is wearing lipstick not allowed at school; when Samet criticizes her for wearing lipstick, she says "I'm sorry", an apology that, I think, is intended to apply to her earlier complaints about Samet.)  Samet with Nuray and Kenan (who are now a couple) go to an archaeological site.  Samet feels out-of-place and he climbs the steep hill above the ruins of the city where there are huge columns and the heads of kings set in a row in front of the acropolis -- it's Mount Nemrut.  The hill is covered with dry grass.  In this coda to the film, Samet's voice-over is heard.  He says that, in this part of the world, there is only Winter and Summer.  Summer dries out the grasses before they are even able to turn green.  Samet imagines that he is full of dry grass and that this means he is wholly inconsequential, withered-up and, at thirty five, seems, spent.  (Earlier he has told us that he is like an abandoned mill that no longer works, waiting to be torn down.)  A vast gulf separates him from Kenan and Nuray.  We see him in close-up scowling down the slope of the hill to where the couple stands in the ruins.  I'm not sure how we are supposed to interpret the disconsolate voice-over -- in my view, it may be that we can disregard all of Samet's pretty remarks as just another example of his histrionic self-pity.

The voice-over in the final scenes is intended to impart some gravitas to the loathsome Samet.  But it doesn't really work.  The guy remains shallow, treacherous, and self-centered.  He imagines little Sevim as a grown up woman (we see her standing in the snow dusted with the stuff) -- "she will be fierce, petulant and strong" he says, but he's not convinced and also imagines her as victim of the same entropic forces that have ruined him.  Samet is too superficial for us to care about and, although he pouts and postures like a Marvel comic books villain, he never gets his comeuppance.  (Samet glowers at people with his head slumped down but his eyes turned to look up at them -- this gives him a peculiarly menacing aspect.)  There are a couple of very noteworthy images in the film.  Samet and Kenan fill plastic bottles from a pipe that drizzles out spring water; the spring is high atop a snowy ridge and affords a spectacular vantage over the distant mountains.  In one scene, we see Samet, Nuray, and Kenan in a Honda.  (I think it's Nuray's car to which she is entitled because of her injury but which she doesn't know how to drive -- Kenan later teaches her to drive.)  They stop the car at the end of a lane next to some shacks, debris, construction detritus at the end of the rutted lane.  Walking about ten paces, the land suddenly drops away from under their feet and we are looking down into a gorge that is about two-thousand feet deep, viewing as if from an airplane a big river bending in a loop below their vantage and right below their feet. The image is shocking and induces a sort of vertiginous feeling in the viewer.  You are afraid that Nuray with her artificial leg will stumble and fall down the cliff -- Samet characteristically plunges downhill recklessly to seem to hover over the enormous landscape.  In the sex scene between Nuray and Samet, the protagonist gets out of bed and exits the room through a side-door.  On the other side of the door, there is a movie studio full of people working on sets or rehearsing, a big interior space where there is even a green screen for computer effects.  The camera follows Samet through this disorienting space to a lavatory where he stoops over a sink to take a pill (something like Viagra or Cialis?)  When we next see him, he's in bed with Nuray again.  What is going on here? I don't know how to interpret this sequence.  Why does Ceylan create this alienation effect, showing that the bedroom is just a little cubicle in a huge set, a big space that extends out to the horizon it seems?  The sense is similar to the wonderful ending of Kiastorami's Taste of Cherry in which a suicide on a mountain suddenly gives way to a complicated tracking shot that shows the movie crew filming the scene that we have just seen.  I found this sequence in Dry Grasses utterly baffling and, in fact, wonder if I actually saw it or merely dreamed the scene.  (Several other critics mention this odd divagation, calling it a "weird Brechtian flourish" in one case; but no one seems to understand why Ceylan would do this.) The movie is shot in the very best non-dramatic, de-emphasized style.  When Samet confesses to Kenan that he has slept with his girlfriend, the camera dispassionately views the scene from over the character's shoulders so we can't really see their faces -- these are long shots 20 to forty seconds in duration.  Ceylan uses this technique because five minutes later, he will need to show a discussion between Nuray, Samet and Kenan -- this is the scene where she confronts the caddish Samet and tries to escape (unsuccessfully) into the snowstorm.  The sequence involving the three actors is shot dramatically with big close-ups.  Clearly, Ceylan wanted to keep the close-ups in reserve until this later sequence.  The movie is exquisitely made and could serve as a master-class in photography and mise-en-scene but the subject matter is dull and picture is much too long.   

(Two aspects of this movie resonate with me.  First, there is the concept of the "weariness of hope".  Samet endorses this idea in contrast to Nuray's assertion that we must remain hopeful that a better world can be produced by our efforts. Elsewhere, I have written on this principle of Hope and find this concept somehow timely in our present political environment. Second, when I was in High School, someone made a complaint against a math teacher.  I don't know what the complaint was about.  But the teacher spent about three weeks sulking melodramatically, refusing to teach, and, when someone asked a question, shouting brusquely:  "You're all geniuses.  Geniuses don't ask questions!"  This was an odd experience that I have never fully, or, even, partially, understood.  But I recall the teacher's weird reign of terror, both frightening and pleasurable as well since he couldn't be prevailed-upon to assign any work to us during this period.)