About Dry Grasses

                  
I highly recommend Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses with the usual caveats about the Turkish director's work. The film is over three hours and very talky and deliberately slow. The camera rarely moves and views the characters remotely. The protagonist is unlikeable. Yet, I savored the film like a fine wine. Ceylan 's remote camera fits a story which is largely concerned with distance between individuals, an ongoing theme in his work. Neophyte directors like Zoë Kravitz in Blink Twice tend to overuse close-ups. In that film, when things get horrific, close-ups of terrorized victims don't have the impact they should because the previous surfeit of the effect ameliorates subsequent usage. Because Ceylan is sparing in his dynamic use of the camera, whips pans and close-ups, particularly one of a pistol, convey the emotional impact intended.

The use of long shots also fits the plight of the main character isolated in a remote village in the hinterlands of Eastern Anatolia. There, the protagonist of the film, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), teaches middle school. He is bitter about being stuck in such a Podunk burg and does not endear himself to his colleagues by constantly complaining about his plight. Of all his colleagues, Samet is closest to Kenan (Musab Ekici) with whom he shares a house. A comely teacher from a larger town nearby named Nuray (Merve Dizdar) enters into a triangular relationship with them that remains superficially pleasant, but underlying tensions simmer. Ceylan's long shots emphasize the beauty and the harshness of the locale. It is extremely difficult to get around in the Anatolian winter, especially for Samet who does not own an automobile. He is constantly bumming rides and sloshing slowly through the slush.

The film's main two plot threads concern sexual power dynamics. Nuray seems to prefer Kenan to Samet, but Samet is able to manipulate Nuray into a one night stand. Nuray is missing a leg from a terrorist attack in Ankara. She fears her attractiveness has diminished and Samet, though not in love with her, is able to manipulate her to his own ends. Samet and Kenan are also embroiled in a small scandal at school when they are charged with being too friendly with young female students. Certainly, what we see of Samet's relationship with his favorite, Sevim, while not overtly sexual, borders on grooming. On the other hand, Sevim is a bit of a minx who has her own subtle power. When Sevim incurs Samet's wrath, he lords his petty power over her. Still, at film's end, it is difficult to say which of the two has gained the upper hand.

This theme of sexual power plays is just one of the motifs in About Dry Grasses that has caused the film to be called Dostoyevskian. In the crazed Russian's fiction, even frustrated virgins and cripples have sexual magnetism and power. The servant often becomes the master when individuals are possessed by eros. Other Dostoyevskian themes here include exile, free will versus determinism, and the plight of animals as a metaphor for eternal suffering. As one character puts it, " How do you expect to care for dogs when no one cares about people." Like Fyodor's Russian, Ceylan's Turkey is a paranoid police state with the icons of power (Atatürk and Erdoğan) watching over. Perhaps the most Dostoyevskian aspect of the film is Samet himself. Samet, much like Ivan Karamazov, is ruled by reason. He sees life's ambiguities rather than its possibilities, hobbled by what Bob Dylan calls "useless and pointless knowledge." He lacks the saving grace of compassion. The only grace notes he strikes are in his photographic portraits, a skill he downplays but which betray traces of empathy and humanity. 

Merve Dizdar won most of the critical accolades for her performance as Nuray, and she is very good, but it is a Mother Courage type role of the sort that begs for awards. I was equally impressed by Deniz Celiloğlu who, as Samet, embodies the contradictions of his character. About Dry Grasses is an actor's feast, as Ceylan gives the cast long, digressive conversations usually, but not always, over tea. This is not everybody's ideal of cinema, much as Dostoyevsky is not everybody's ideal of literature (especially Nabokov who thought Fyodor should have written for the theater), but I'll take it over whatever CGI comic book movie you can think of.