From (your email address)
To (your friend's email address)
Subject
About Dry Grasses shows at IFS on Sun November 3, 2024, 2:00 PM
Your comments:
About Dry Grasses
Two paths lie before the artist. One is through empathy, identifying deeply with the world and interpreting it so others can peer through the artist’s eyes. The other is detachment, standing apart from everyone and everything, observing it from a position of cool remove.
Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the protagonist of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses,” is the second kind of artist, and it has not been great for his soul. Four years into his mandatory service as a public school art teacher in East Anatolia, he’s fed up with the locals, whom he finds to be mostly a waste of time. But he isn’t terribly kind to anyone, including his roommate and fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), who likes living there and enjoys his work. Samet is miserable, and eager for a transfer to Istanbul.
The one bright light — or at least, distraction — in Samet’s life is Sevim (Ece Bagci), his teachers’ pet, a bright-eyed eighth grader who probably has a crush on her teacher. Their interactions cross no lines. But they interact like peers, and Samet brings her a small and insignificant gift, and even the other students have noticed he only calls on Sevim and her friends in class. Which is why Samet is so shocked, and affronted, when he discovers that two pupils have accused him and Kenan of inappropriate contact with students. He can guess who those two are, and he’s mortified and angry.
From here the story starts churning, and Samet’s bad mood deepens. Ceylan, the living reigning master of Turkish cinema, loves to throw a displaced intellectual into a confounding situation and watch him squirm, but his camera is always a source of stillness, pausing for long stretches on the same frame, often juxtaposing the natural landscape with a character’s internal life. Here, the landscape is wintry. Everyone is forever trudging through the snow, and the eternal whiteness throws individual figures and faces into sharp relief.
Samet sees the potential for a great image — he is an artist, after all. Ceylan sprinkles stunning still portraits into the film, presumably taken by Samet, of the local people, which might suggest he has some interest in their lives after all. But if he feels curiosity, he masks it well. The center of Samet’s world is Samet and his superiority.
Portraiture can capture something ephemeral about a person’s essence, or it can simply be composition, fixing people into a landscape. Samet’s portraits, though stunning, are the latter. He tells his students one day that they’ll study portraiture, but when they balk, he just tells them to draw what they know — as if they couldn’t know people at all.
Ceylan’s portrait of an artist feels a bit self-referential, or perhaps self-inquisitive. In addition to his filmmaking, Ceylan is a photographer, like Samet. His films often function as their own kind of portraiture. They’re long, and slow, and their sheer duration coaxes the audience to stop simply looking at his characters as pawns in a story and enter the texture of their inner lives. In one surprise moment, both viewer and characters are suddenly popped out of their context, reframing everything we’ve been watching. Suddenly we see Samet as a man who is performing for everyone; he is telling his story instead of living it.
In “About Dry Grasses,” Ceylan is asking a vital question of himself as well as the audience: What does it mean to be engaged in the world? And if you choose to back away and watch, rather than become involved, is it self-protection, superiority or just cowardice?
“About Dry Grasses” clocks in at nearly three and a half hours, but the running time feels right. It has the warp and woof of an epic in miniature, one that feels literary and also oddly anti-literary, because Samet never really changes. The landscape doesn’t either. Whether or not the world can change is an even bigger question and one that Ceylan isn’t interested in answering. Instead, he is placing two paths before us, and before himself.
- Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
To see a trailer and read a review, visit InternationalFilmSeries.com .
Send me a copy too
