About Dry Grass­es – first-look review

Like a patient nat­u­ral­ist with his dig­i­tal cam­era pre-primed, Turk­ish film­mak­er Nuri Bilge Cey­lan is adept at spot­ting dyed-in-the-wool male mis­an­thropes out there wan­der­ing the snowswept Ana­to­lian plains. About Dry Grass­es, his thrilling, engross­ing epic of no-hold-barred parochial intel­lec­tu­al­ism might be seen as the last chap­ter of a tril­o­gy, fol­low­ing 2013’s Win­ter Sleep and 2018 The Wild Pear Tree, about entrenched male malaise and the sti­fling social edicts of life in a small village.

Deniz Celiloglu’s Samet is a pri­ma­ry school teacher who clear­ly believes he’s wast­ing his poten­tial in a sleepy burg where most of the pop­u­la­tion live in tin shacks and can bare­ly afford clothes to keep them alive through the long and harsh win­ters. Yet he is avun­cu­lar and charm­ing, and uses his supe­ri­or intel­lect and com­plex world­view to imbue some of the brighter stu­dents with his rebel­lious spir­it, while also gen­tly kick­ing against a strict­ly con­ser­v­a­tive cur­ricu­lum over­seen by bureau­crats and idiots.

Through Samet, Cey­lan por­trays a type of aspi­rant bour­geois flan­neur who both lacks the imag­i­na­tion to break free of his sup­posed domes­tic stric­tures, but is also too self-impor­tant to believe that hap­pi­ness and con­tent­ment would ever be achiev­able, so why switch things up? His sense of hon­our is dent­ed when a small inci­dent at school leads to one of his favourite stu­dents, Ece Bagci’s mature-beyond-her-years Sevim, to make a com­plaint about him, and his bruised ego becomes the cat­a­lyst for a cam­paign of qui­et aggres­sion towards her.

From this set-up, you might view About Dry Grass­es as a film that deals with the con­cept of ​“can­cel cul­ture”, as Cey­lan appears to be sug­gest­ing that such spu­ri­ous accu­sa­tions seem to hold more weight in the cur­rent cli­mate of fear and reprisal. Yet, this is more a study of Samet’s slow-cooked reac­tion to the inci­dent, and how it does and doesn’t play out in oth­er aspects of his life – most notably his grad­ual courtship with teacher and trau­ma­tised vic­tim of a sui­cide bomb­ing, Nuray (Merve Dizdar).

The film plays out as a series of labyrinthine con­ver­sa­tions in rooms between peo­ple who are always able to keep their phys­i­cal emo­tions in check. These arm­chair philoso­phers mine the deep­est pits of despair and tor­ment, but are some­how able to artic­u­late their woes in the most gor­geous­ly poet­ic and mel­liflu­ous way imag­in­able. Cey­lan is an artist with a type­writer, and the screen­play for this one is some­thing that should, by all rights, be hung in the Lou­vre, par­tic­u­lar­ly a lengthy, exis­ten­tial­ly-inclined con­fab between Samet and Nuray in which both char­ac­ters press and press and press one anoth­er for answers that remain tan­ta­lis­ing­ly illusive.

One thing that char­ac­teris­es this films against its direct pre­de­ces­sors is its rel­a­tive lev­i­ty, and the film draws humour out of one man’s jour­ney to try and offload his appar­ent­ly end­less stores of bit­ter­ness and resent­ment. And yet, Samet nev­er comes across like an antag­o­nist, or a fig­ure that Cey­lan wants you to direct your own hatred towards. He is thought­ful, con­fi­dent, con­fused and mali­cious, but also frag­ile and clear­ly very sad. Celiloglu’s care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed per­for­mance, com­bined with a screen­play which nev­er descents to scur­rilous sign­post­ing, makes Samet a per­son of end­less lit­er­ary intrigue – a mon­ster and a mar­tyr trapped inside the same body.