About Dry Grasses

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses plants a schoolteacher in a snowbound Anatolian village and watches his plans for escape curdle. Samet, played by Deniz Celiloğlu, has served his mandatory post in the countryside and expects a transfer to Istanbul. Then a student's accusation lands, and the bureaucratic machinery that once seemed so navigable turns against him. The film runs three hours and seventeen minutes, and Ceylan uses every minute to study how resentment builds in confined places.

Ceylan wrote the screenplay with Akın Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, and the result is talky in the best sense: long conversations where people reveal more than they intend. Merve Dizdar won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her turn as Nuray, a fellow teacher whose politics and injuries give the story a second center of gravity. Musab Ekici plays Kenan, Samet's colleague and eventual rival, while Ece Bağcı is Sevim, the student at the heart of the charge.

The production cost about $3.7 million and drew financing from Turkey, France, Germany, and Sweden, with NBC Film and Komplizen Film among the companies involved. Ceylan's regular collaborators Cevahir Şahin and Kürsat Üresin shot it, and Philip Timofeyev composed the score. It is a drama of winter light and verbal warfare, closer in spirit to Ceylan's Winter Sleep than to anything with a tidy moral. A 7.6 rating across early audience votes suggests the festival crowd took to it; general viewers may find the length and the self-regarding protagonist harder to love. [edit]

Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) is an art teacher from Istanbul finishing his fourth year of compulsory service at a public school in a remote, snow-covered village in East Anatolia. He lives in a modest apartment, shares meals and long, circular conversations with his younger colleague and roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici), and spends his days teaching indifferent children and nursing a quiet, corrosive contempt for nearly everyone around him. His one real ambition is escape: a transfer back to Istanbul, which he believes is close at hand and richly deserved.

The film's first movement is a patient, almost novelistic study of village life in winter. Ceylan and his co-writers give Samet a sharp tongue and a sharper sense of grievance; he is intelligent, articulate, and convinced of his own superiority, and the film watches him perform that superiority in staff rooms, in corridors, and in the classroom. Among his students is Sevim (Ece Bağcı), a quiet girl to whom he has shown a measure of informal attention, small gifts, a bit of encouragement, gestures that read differently depending on who is watching. When Sevim and another student level an accusation of inappropriate conduct against Samet and Kenan, the film's machinery lurches into motion: an investigation, a visit from the authorities, the sudden transformation of a bored bureaucrat's life into a case file.

What follows is not a courtroom drama but something stranger and more interior. Samet's plans for Istanbul begin to curdle; the accusation becomes a prism through which his relationships, with Kenan, with the school's principal Bekir (Onur Berk Arslanoğlu) and assistant principal Saime (Elif Ürse), with the students, and with himself, are refracted. The film's second movement widens the world when Samet and Kenan meet Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a fellow teacher who lives in a nearby town. Nuray is a political idealist, physically marked by an injury sustained in a bombing, and possessed of a moral seriousness that Samet finds both magnetic and intolerable. The three teachers begin to spend time together, dinners, walks, long arguments about art, politics, love, and Turkey, and a triangular tension develops between Samet's self-regard, Kenan's quieter decency, and Nuray's clear-eyed judgment.

The film's centerpiece is an extended, multi-course conversation in Nuray's home that runs for a remarkable stretch of screen time, in which the characters reveal themselves through talk the way Ceylan's people always do: obliquely, defensively, and then suddenly, woundingly, directly. Samet's resentment, of the village, of his students, of his colleagues, of Nuray's moral authority, of his own failure to become the person he imagined, builds in confined rooms and under blank white skies. The film is less interested in whether Samet is guilty than in what the accusation exposes about a man who has spent years telling himself a flattering story about his own life.

By the final act, Samet's prospects have shifted in ways he did not anticipate and cannot fully control, and the film moves toward a reckoning with the gap between the self Samet performs and the self he actually is. The title, dry grasses buried under snow, waiting for a spring that may or may not come, hangs over everything.[edit]