At the Sydney Film Festival and soon in cinemas - Janice Tong's short take on ABOUT DRY GRASSES (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkiye/France/Germany, 2024)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

 

If you want to experience a film that is a slow but sure emotional assault that lasts for the best part of 3 hours and 15 mins then this is the film for you. This is not to say that Nuri Bilge Ceylan is not a master cineaste, it is just, for me at least, About Dry Grasses is a tremendously uneasy film to watch. What is fascinating with Ceylan’s eye, is that it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is that makes this an uncomfortable screening experience, sure, there is an undercurrent of violence throughout, despite the articulate composition, mundane bickering, consummate acting, and some brief moments of poetic beauty. Is it terrible to say that this film reminded me of violent rape scene in Gaspar Noé 2002 Irréversible – that you feel obliged to watch the scene because of its sympathetic camera angle (due to its position on the ground, it puts you on the same point of view of the victim) as the horror unfolds? I remember many people walking out of the French Film Festival screening of that film, and a small handful from this one.

 

The opening scene speaks of an immeasurably bleak snowfield, and one of the most beautiful scenes in the entire film: a long walk from the bus shows a man arriving back from holidays to start the winter term. He is Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), an art teacher at a local high school who returns begrudgingly to work. His hideout, the sports storeroom. Amongst the clutter of equipment it makes him seem like Q from a Bond story, where the things that he hoards are but toys for destruction. Though he’s been here many years, it seems he still lives a transient life, using the school and its provided accommodation to pass the time until he can move on – his dream is to go to Istanbul to teach at a larger school. This is the same for many other teachers, the school and this remote village in Eastern Anatolia is a space of purgatory until you move elsewhere. As Samet later tells the audience in a voiceover, there are only two seasons here, summer and winter, two extreme opposites, and just as the climes shapes the exterior: craggy mountains and its rustle of yellowing dry grasses in summer, having missed the grace of spring, it also moulds the behaviour and temperaments of its inhabitants. You become old without understanding the joy of being young.

 

Deniz Celiloglu

As the school term starts, it's no wonder that Samet laps up the affection from a young school girl, Sevim (Ece Bagci), a touch here, a gift there; they engage in a kind of mentor/protégé flirtation until a love letter written by Sevim is confiscated by another teacher. Although the narrative leads us to believe the letter was intended for another boy, Samet takes pride in thinking it was written for him and uses it to gain an upper hand in the game. Of course, all this soon turns sour, when Samet and his housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici), another teacher at the school, were accused of behavioural misconduct by two students, and you guessed it, Sevim is one of them. 

 

The fact that in this film Samet is not even an antihero – there’s little that is charming about him – makes it difficult to feel any sympathy towards him. He is juvenile in his behaviour towards his housemate, colleagues and potential girlfriend. The extravagant but effective move when Ceylan breaks the fourth wall by tracking Samet’s insecurity through the actual film studio corridors and sets, green screen, cameras, electrical cables and all, ahead of a potential sexual encounter, his conquest of Nuray (a beautifully wrought performance by Merve Dizdar, who deservingly won Best Actress in the 2023 Cannes Film Festival), was such a welcome break of tension for the audience…to acknowledge that, yes, we know, Samet is only a character in the film. 

 

Merve Dizdar

There is no doubt that Ceylan’s cinema is affecting, with long passages of time that invites his audience to fully submerge into the narrative, to be amongst his protagonists (whether we like them or not), he has the ability to hold us captive (not just captivated) in the very atmosphere of the film. His other films Winter Sleep (2014) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), both previously shown at the SFF were more poetic aesthetically and from these films, we have come to know and love Ceylan for his slow cinema; where the idea of Bergson’s durée (or duration) can only be played out and experienced cinematically. I especially enjoy this lived time within a cinematographic image, and how it can take you out of yourself. Unlike any experiences in real life, you get to live this brighter and bigger second-life on screen. A few of the ‘photographs’, (Samet is an amateur photographer) are filled with this kind of filmic time – a frozen instance of a gaze that stares back at you, whilst the snow still falls, and the wind twists and wraps your hair about your face; but, for that moment, lays bare an existential connection with another person.

 

About Dry Grasses is a meticulously made film; the layering of artifice and meaning, misinterpretation and deceit, cruelty and conquests, not only makes us realise the complexity humans tend to weave in our relationships with each other. The knowledge that there is no letting go once you’ve sunk your teeth into another’s can all but tear apart what it has a hold of. And Ceylan’s eye is as unflinching as it is unsentimental against the daily struggles of the human condition.