‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Crafts His Most Layered Picture Yet — FilmSpeak

Nov 04, 2024

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mid-stage works, including Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, his Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep, and The Wild Pear Tree, require your attention and time. Each film runs over two hours and forty minutes (with most of them over three hours) and is incredibly unhurried in its pace and how the story introduces itself to the viewer. In them, Ceylan examines his characters and themes slowly, deliberately, with an aesthetic that slowly shifts as its protagonists evolve within the picture.

His latest movie, About Dry Grasses, is his longest film yet. At 197 minutes, it explores the toxic, often abusive relationship between an art professor and his students as allegations of inappropriate conduct begin to consume him. The professor is Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), who, while stern in his teaching methods, has maintained a level of respect from his students and the school’s administration. Samet has recently returned from a holiday, and we meet him as he rewards his brightest students with gifts and affection, including young pupil Sevim (Ece Bağci), whom Samet believes is much more intelligent than the other students in his class.

However, when a surprise class inspection unveils a love letter Sevim has written (the contents of the letter aren’t shown, but it’s strongly implied it’s for Samet), the student-professor relationship quickly sours, as Samet keeps the letter from her and pretends he has torn it into tiny pieces so no one else will be able to read it. Sevim knows he is lying and quickly retaliates against her favorite professor by accusing him and his housemate, Kenan (Musab Ekici), also a professor, of inappropriate conduct toward the students.

The scene in which the two go to the Director of Education (Yıldırım Gücük), in which he reveals to them what happened, happens close to the film’s hour-mark. Beforehand, we observe Samet as he builds his rapport with the people he likes, and it already feels slightly off. But he doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. And so when the Director tells them there’s been a complaint, he feels surprised and betrayed by what he considered his favorite student. Not only that, but his superior status as a professor has been pitifully brought down by seventh graders who don’t know any better.

As soon as he returns to school, his behavior towards his students and colleagues immediately changes, slowly revealing his insecurities as a professor and a human being. Instead of apologizing to his students and brushing off the allegations, which have been taken care of by the Department of Education, Samet adds fuel to the fire by breaking down each student’s dreams while also crushing the aspirations of Kenan’s blossoming romance with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a retired military soldier turned teacher after losing her leg in an explosion.

One of the film’s most potent sequences happens near its midpoint, where Kenan and Nuray completely ignore Samet as they discuss Nuray’s recent car purchase. Samet introduced Kenan to her to potentially match, as he plans to leave Anatolia for Istanbul once his transfer is approved. But as they slowly begin to fall in love, Samet attempts to manipulate Nuray’s feelings towards him, even if he himself doesn’t feel anything towards her, particularly regarding her left-wing politics. There’s a legitimate sense of tension that Ceylan slowly boils in Samet’s mind as he grapples with Sevim’s allegations, and Kenan’s love towards Nuray.

It doesn’t take long for audiences to realize that Samet is deeply selfish and will put his interests first above everyone else’s, continuously manipulating his students into feeling bad for themselves rather than fixing his character. It’s why the allegations hit him at a deeper psychological level than they otherwise would have because Samet is incapable of realizing the error of his ways. Virtually everyone sees through his lies (his broken, almost pitiful facial expressions continuously betray him), including Sevim, but Samet continuously flips their preconceptions of him to their head, verbally humiliating them to the point of abuse.

As Samet, Celiloğlu crafts a quietly unnerving turn as a man riddled by his own insecurities. He would rather flip his lies to the people he likes than tell the truth and admit his wrongdoings. There isn’t a single ‘good’ bone in his body, as he always adopts multiple façades to ultimately get what he wants. His transformation is equally suffocating, as we observe his ego fragilizing itself deeper as he self-humiliates himself into a literal and figurative pit of despair. The path to redemption is there and is as clear as day.

However, once he opens a door and literally exits the film’s diegesis in one of the most staggering uses of fourth-wall breaking you may ever see, the audience knows that he has entered the point of no return. Preceding that fourth-wall break is an almost unbroken exchange between Nuray and Samet, as the two discuss their political allegiances and respective views of the world over wine. What starts as a casual, friendly dinner quickly turns sour as Nuray sees Samet’s intentions as clearer as day. Instead of revealing them, she deliberately gets to him by quietly discussing the state of the world and his views within it.

The scene is a masterclass in tension building in dialogue writing, with each line acting like a dagger through Samet and Nuray’s hearts, and the camera’s aesthetic slowly shifting itself to more thought-provoking movements and cuts, exacerbating the tension on display rather than diffusing it. It’s astounding how calculated each visual choice in About Dry Grasses is. From the multiple montages of portraits representing a shift in Samet’s arc to the sparse whip-pans cinematographers Kürşat Üresin and Cevahir Şahin use at a moment of almost overwhelming emotional complexity, Ceylan is in complete control of each visual aspect the film progressively builds to the viewers inside its three-hour runtime.

In the final hour, Ceylan brings his most striking images and transitions, including the most effective match-cut I’ve seen since Laurence Fishburne recreated the most potent visual moment of Lawrence of Arabia in John Wick: Chapter 4. It may seem weird to compare apples and oranges, but rarely have filmmakers drawn transitions that feel more absorbing than abrupt. Ceylan and co-editor Oğuz Atabaş draw the audience further into the film with each calculated cut and transition as a part of its lived-in world and in developing the characters.

When Samet breaks the fourth wall to do one of the most unspeakably irredeemable acts any protagonist could do, it gives Ceylan an even bigger control of how he operates his images, characters, and world inside the artificial lens of a camera. If the central theme of About Dry Grasses is dishonesty, then there is nothing more dishonest than cinema, whose entire act is based on trickery. Actors create a character based on their own preconceptions and understanding of the director’s intentions, but none of them can draw someone entirely honest since acting is, by extension, lying. To reach the point of no return, Samet must break the film’s diegesis, which shows how insincere Ceylan’s entire construction is.

With that small break in artificiality, Ceylan says more about cinema’s origins and doomed future than an entire worth of Hollywood pictures released this decade ever will. It may be the riskiest moment of his career, but he’s been naturally building towards it since Winter Sleep. When the film eventually returns to its diegesis, the audience knows everything that will follow (and has preceded) it is a lie. There’s no natural return to its artificial world. It’s all a trick. No matter what we believe and what we seemingly enjoy in it.