When we first glimpse schoolteacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), he’s little more than a sooty smudge in the wide, white snowscape of a bitter Anatolian winter. Spilled out of a minibus after a holiday, he registers displeasure with every heavy step through the blizzard as he returns to a place he describes repeatedly as a hellhole. Thick snowfall blurs the edges of his advancing figure, which takes an unexpectedly long time to take on a solid, three-dimensional form. Such unhurried pacing prevails for nearly three-and-a-half hours in this Turkish-language arthouse epic, the latest from festival heavyweight and 2014 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It’s an approach familiar from his previous pictures, such as Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as a portrait of Samet is built by increments, slowly revealing his complexities and calculations. And what a thoroughly reprehensible individual he turns out to be.
About Dry Grasses unfolds in a region renowned for its beauty, something the film’s elegantly composed widescreen cinematography emphasises throughout. Samet, though, is immune to its charms. Assigned by the government as an art teacher to a rural backwater school, he’s counting the months until the mandatory four years in the job have been completed and he can request a transfer – he has his eye on a post in Istanbul. In the meantime, he enjoys the minor celebrity his city background affords him, accepting offers of tea and cynicism from everyone from the local army captain to shady underworld figures. With his closest friend and roommate, fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), Samet affects a tone of jaded resignation that just about passes for wry humour.
But he has genuine affection for one of his young students, 14-year-old giggly teacher’s pet Sevim (Ece Bağci). She nurses a crush on him. He favours her in the classroom, and in private indulges her with small gifts. There is no real impropriety to the relationship. Deep down, though, Samet knows that his attentions overstep the normal teacher-student boundaries. This becomes an issue of concern when, after a surprise bag search in the classroom (an inciting incident strikingly similar to that in last year’s Oscar-nominated German film The Teachers’ Lounge), a love note is confiscated from Sevim. She believes that Samet has it and asks for it to be returned; he (falsely) claims to have destroyed it. In retaliation, Sevim and her friend lodge complaints of impropriety against Samet and Kenan. There are several appropriate ways to handle a situation such as this, but Samet’s reaction – lie and deny, then bully and victimise his accuser – isn’t one of them.
While the two men are united in their anger at the injustice of the accusations, it becomes clear that Samet wouldn’t hesitate to throw his friend under a bus should the need arise. And it soon does, with both men attracted to Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a magnetic fellow teacher from a nearby town. Samet registers his annoyance at being cut out of a warm conversation between Nuray and Kenan with a loud and petulant clatter of spoon against tea glass. Music in the film is stripped back to an almost subliminal level, other sound foregrounded. But mostly, as with much of Ceylan’s previous work, the film is driven by dialogue – pages of it, delivered in dauntingly long takes. About Dry Grasses tiptoes around the edge of being suffocatingly verbose, and there are scenes that could stand a tighter edit. Still, the meaty, novelistic writing and exceptional quality of the performances make for a rich and engrossing viewing experience.
What’s most daring and unexpected, however, is Ceylan’s decision to jolt us out of it, about three-quarters of the way through, with an audacious, fourth-wall-smashing device. A picture that deals with deception and lies suddenly draws back the curtain and confronts us with another layer of artifice. It’s either a brilliant formal provocation or it’s just Ceylan pranking the people who fell asleep in the 20-minute philosophical debate that preceded it.
In UK and Irish cinemas
