Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan has delivered one other of his expansive, ruminative and distinctly Chekhovian character-driven dramas. Once more it’s unfold out throughout the panorama of western Anatolia, and once more there’s Ceylan’s emphasis on nonetheless images and portraiture. This movie does nonetheless have one very atypical contact: a really startling and Brechtian meta-moment once we are reminded it is a movie we’re watching, and the tiny and flickeringly firelit interiors are created on a soundstage.
It actually does nonetheless have a really typical title: that’s, forbidding and barely disconcerting. In About Dry Grasses’s closing part, its lead character is to ponder the truth that the gauntly stunning terrain of Anatolia appears to have solely two seasons. The primary is the snow-covered winter through which we get Ceylan’s signature shot of a lonely determine plodding in direction of the digital camera within the snow. This immediately offers approach to shiny summer time, ahe floor will reveal itself to be lined in a featureless dry grass, which has a mysterious fascination in its austere magnificence.
On the face of it, the movie is (yet one more) faculty drama a few instructor whose profession is imperilled by a sexual abuse cost from a pupil. Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is a balding instructor at a state faculty within the distant area who may be very candidly uninterested in every little thing – or nearly every little thing – and longs for a posting to Istanbul. He’s a instructor who prides himself, a bit smugly, on how pleasant and approachable he’s with the pupils, however is able to bad-tempered outbursts through which Ceilioglu may be very convincing. He shares lodgings with a fellow instructor, the youthful and extra personable Kenan (Musab Ekici).
Samet has a favorite pupil: Sevim (Ece Bagci) a 14-year-old with whom he has flirtatious banter and generally places his arm spherical. When a heart-bedecked love letter addressed to Samet is present in Sevim’s train e book by a member of employees, Sevim is humiliated and tearful and Samet is coldly embarrassed: his heat affection to her is changed by a cautious sense that that is going to get him into hassle.
And so it proves. Sevim involves his workplace, the scene of so many inappropriate chats previously and begs Samet to offer the letter again to her; she immediately senses that his patronising declare to have destroyed it’s a lie. In that second, all her emotions for her instructor are reworked into rage, and that is to end in an abuse declare levelled towards each Samet and Kenan. The insecure and prickly Samet suspects that it’s the extra enticing Kenan who’s the prime object of those allegations (left unspecified by the varsity authorities), and this preposterous aggressive streak has implications for his budding relationship with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a girl who seems to favor Kenan.
Life goes on on this place; the investigation into Samet goes on, his tough and duplicitious friendship with Kenan goes on and so does his chatty, sarky friendship with different folks within the village. All of it continues with out reaching any very sensational endpoint, but with out feeling anticlimactic both. This movie, so apparently forbidding and opaque the best way many Ceylan movies initially are, has in truth one thing engrossing in its garrulous and wide-ranging high quality: a literary high quality in truth. Ceylan endows Samet with the qualities of a wryly observant narrator, disillusioned and unhappy and but beneficiant sufficient in his approach.
That is one other very absorbing film from this distinctive director — a Cannes Palme winner for his movie Winter Sleep — who completely deserves his persevering with A-list standing at Cannes.
