About Dry Grasses (2023) (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

About Dry Grasses by Nuri Bilge Ceylan is another masterpiece from the Turkish auteur.

Weariness of Hope

by Alexa Dalby

About Dry Grasses
★★★★★

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

Is it too fanciful to see director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s preferred region of Anatolia – remote, frozen, snow-ridden – as a metaphor for the moribund state of the country of Turkey itself? It’s certainly a setting he knows and keeps returning to in his films. And see a state school as a microcosm of a country and its government?

About Dry Grasses is set again in a wintry village, about as far east as it is possible to go and still be in Turkey and in the beautiful mountains near Erzurum, where it seems to the residents to snow six months of the year. It has a significant Kurdish (Alawi) minority, as we see in two of the characters. As in Brother’s Keeper, we see the plight of newly qualified teachers unwillingly posted to state schools in a region they didn’t want to go to and where they have to stay for four years of good behaviour until they are eligible for a transfer.

The anti-hero we get to know over a gripping 3 hours 17 minutes is Samet (Deniz Celiloglu). At first we see him in signature longshot as a dark-clothed figure outlined against a wide, white expanse, plodding a long distance in a snow storm across the snow-covered waste from where the bus dropped him off to the house he shares with fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici). It’s the first day back after the holidays.

At first, we see that Samet seems to get on well with the local police/army chief, his teacher colleagues and his class of students, who seem pleased to see him – there’s plenty of good-natured banter and he even gives a present to his favourite, 14-year-old lively Sevim (Ece Bagci). He’s an art teacher who teaches the value of perspective (significant?) but has never tried to be an artist. But it emerges that he seems to look down on everyone around him, intellectually and socially, and his voiceover tells us how he sees his story.

Then we gradually see the other side of Samet. A snap classroom inspection reveals a very personal love letter Sevim has drafted, presumably to him. She doesn’t reveal his identity as the giver of the gift that’s found as well, but instead of being grateful, he lies to her about having destroyed the letter. Unfortunately, when she tries to get it back, she sees through his pretence. Samet and blameless Kenan are reported anonymously for sexual misconduct with a pupil, though he insists on finding out who. Samet seems ready to throw his ‘friend’ Kenan “under a bus” to save himself.

Also, Samet is set up on a blind date with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), who won best actress at Cannes for this role. She is a ferociously intelligent, left-wing teacher and artist at a different state school, left disabled by a suicide bomber. Samet doesn’t fancy her – until she seems to prefer Kenan, prompting him to act like a “dog in a manger”: he just sees her as a way to achieve his ambition of getting posted to the bright lights of Istanbul. Their lengthy debate about politics is the centrepiece of the film and you desperately hope that in her enthusiasm she doesn’t fall for his weary lack of commitment and hope.

The film unfolds like a huge novel where we get to know the characters over time. Those are the bones of the plot, but throughout the film there are debates with various individuals about political engagement versus cynicism, action versus inaction and the state versus the individual in the context of the nation of Turkey. Aside, almost unnoticed, we see statues of Erdogan and Ataturk. Ceylan also uses photographs to show character and there’s a strange, unexplained, breaking of the fourth wall by one of the characters in the middle of a scene that reminds us that we are only watching a film.

Eventually the snow lifts, but meanwhile the hearts of the people have been stunted and dried up, like the ruins of a once-mighty civilisation that can now be visited, and who knows what can happen?