Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan has delivered another of his expansive, ruminative and distinctly Chekhovian character-driven dramas. Again it is spread out across the landscape of western Anatolia, and again there is Ceylan’s emphasis on still photography and portraiture. This film does however have one very atypical touch: a very startling and Brechtian meta-moment when we are reminded this is a film we’re watching, and the tiny and flickeringly firelit interiors are created on a soundstage.
It certainly does however have a very typical title: that is, forbidding and slightly disconcerting. In About Dry Grasses’s final section, its lead character is to ponder the fact that the gauntly beautiful terrain of Anatolia seems to have only two seasons. The first is the snow-covered winter in which we get Ceylan’s signature shot of a lonely figure plodding towards the camera in the snow. This suddenly gives way to bright summer, ahe ground will reveal itself to be covered in a featureless dry grass, which has a mysterious fascination in its austere beauty.
