About Dry Grasses

(Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

2023

About Dry Grasses contains absolutely no information about grasses, dry or otherwise. Which is probably a good thing, since the flick is a phenomenal 3 hours and 10 minutes long. Three hours and 9 minutes of that running time contain no mentions of dry grasses whatsoever. But in that last minute, in voiceover, our jerk of a main character mumbles some depressing stuff about how no one notices or cares that much about the dry grasses growing on a hillside.

To be fair, as Homer Simpson once wisely intoned, To Kill a Mockingbird contains no useful information about how to kill mockingbirds, which means the book, banned in some states in the US for being too racist, and in other states for not being racist enough, is a textbook case of false advertising.

Damn, what a journey (absolutely nowhere) this dense flick is. Set in the Eastern, quite backwards looking parts of Anatolia, in the country we now all are meant to call Türkiye, a disgruntled teacher called Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) acts disgruntled for over three hours. He’s not from around here. He resents the backwards residents of this town and their backwards kids. He feels like everyone and everything sucks and is against him.

Although he does seem to have favourites. Upon returning from holidays, he gives a gift to one of his students, being Sevim (Ece Bağci), who I think is a young Kurdish girl in his class. It’s just a little hand mirror, but if your red flag senses are tingling, they probably have every right to.

It’s a primary school, the classes are overflowing but in small rooms, and Samet is on a contract with the government he cannot break tying him to the town for the rest of the year. He shares a house with a fellow teacher, Kenan (Musab Ekici), and by ‘house’ I mean hovel by any other definition. They live in bachelor-like squalor.

Everything in this flick is in a minor key, is the best way I can describe it. And wherever it’s going to go, which isn’t far, it’s going to take its time getting there. In other earlier flicks from this director that I’ve seen, the long running time of the film was in most part made up of acres and acres of nature scenes, and of watching people slowly do things for extended periods of time.

That’s not as applicable here. This flick is dense with scenes of people talking (even as there are artistic interludes of portraits and nature scenes as well. Much of the film transpires in winter, so most of the nature scenes involve footage of snow falling or the land itself covered in snow drifts.

It's all very beautiful. That is, in contrast, to the ugliness that people are capable of.

Of this director’s flicks, the early one that most impressed me was Once Upon a Time in Anatolia which came out over a decade ago, and it seemed like it was about a murder investigation, but it really wasn’t. It was really about this group of disparate guys driving around, and some of the people they interacted with, and a lot of stuff that was implied but never made explicit. There were tensions, themes, ideas, regrets, all sorts of things. And, looking back on the review I wrote for that flick, I said *that* was a slow film that went for ages, and that was only two and a half hours long.

Many of the same insinuations about just how backwards the eastern parts of the country (and its people) are here as well, but for a country with a dictator for life as president, and one-party rule / rigged elections, even a director of Ceylan’s standing has to be treading carefully. The government has literally passed legislation that has created the legal criminal offence of insulting ‘Turkishness’, which is about the dumbest fucking thing anyone has ever heard of. But what it means is that any time a writer or a journalist or, presumably a film maker criticises the conduct of the government, the police, the other jerks whose job it is to act like the Stassi against their own citizens, they can be charged and convicted of a crime, and it’s all legal.

So Ceylan’s sly criticisms have to be oblique. Characters talking about the cops or the army turning up and hauling their fathers or uncles away always refers to something that happened pre-Erdogan. People horribly affected by acts of extremist terrorism refer to those crimes having occurred in such a way that they never made the papers and no-one acknowledged that anything ever happened. The discontent people express is generally not about the political, or The System, but of individuals who’ve acted in ways that exceed what the “rules” would impose.

Someone who was previously a women’s rights and socialist activist perhaps steps over the line (from the perspective of the shitty, small-minded dickheads who try to strangle artistic and personal expression in that country) both in the film and outside of it. That actor, Merve Dizdar, playing a one legged character called Nuray, received an award at Cannes last year for this performance.
When she dedicated her award to the brave women of Türkiye fighting for women’s rights in the face of a shitty chauvinistic culture and government, she was of course accused of undermining the very foundations of the nation themselves by the head of the censorious pricks that regulate film, television and radio in the country.

Bleurgh. Fuck off, fascist. She is a really strong and complex character in a flick that strains to accommodate her, because the other characters aren’t always that nuanced or layered. The film’s best scenes involve her, and they both involve what she argues about with how she argues about them. In such a long talky flick I cannot imagine that these characters memorised the reams and reams of all the things that they say. I have no doubt there was a full script, but if all the things they say onscreen were written down, that script would have been 500 pages long.

If I have problems with the film, and I do, it mostly comes down to how unpleasant the main character is. I am sure it’s a great performance, from the perspective of other audience members and the director. The thing is, for me, is that the older I’ve gotten, the less time I now have for bitter, curmudgeonly jerks.

When I was younger, they sounded like wise oracles, like brilliant truthtellers, cutting through artifice and illusions and getting through to The Truth.

These days I see it in a different light, and connect far less with that mentality. Samet starts off resentful, but not a complete arsehole. He progresses through the film becoming more and more of an arsehole, whether rightly or wrongly, and I don’t really see the justification for it through the things that happen around him and his reaction to it all.

And especially the shitty things he does and says.

Early on he shows clear favouritism towards one of his students, clear enough that some of the other students notice, which he yells at them for and shuts them down. But then a hazy accusation of inappropriate behavior with students lands him not in hot water, but in a humiliated state. Naturally, despite the promises of anonymity and protection, he gets to malign and even racially abuse the previous object of his admiration / affection.

But that’s not enough for him. He goes on one date with a teacher (previously mentioned Nuray), and decides to palm her off to his housemate. When his housemate Kenan shows interest in Nuray, and she seems to reflect it back, he gets jealous. When he puts two and two together and comes up with fourteen over the allegations of inappropriateness, he decides he needs to get revenge against Kenan in order to feel like less of the shitty person that he is.

In the extended argument he has with Nuray as she tries to pin down what he actually stands for or believes, and he dodges and weaves indefinitely, all of this is happening in a context where he doesn’t actually care about the argument, or about her, but where his objective is to manipulate her into doing what he wants.

And then there’s *that* scene. After kissing Nuray, she asks him to turn out the lights in the front room, I think it was, which he does, and then, when it seems he’s about to walk into the bathroom, he walks through a doorway into a corridor, past people working on different sets, across an expanse in what is clearly a movie studio space, to an open bathroom set, not breaking character, where he pops a pill, presumably before walking back to the other set or a different one.

We’re spared that walk back, but we’ve been reminded of the artifice of what we’re watching. Maybe it’s intended as a “hey, he’s just an actor pretending to be a prick, not a person who is a complete prick.”

Afterwards, or at least the next morning, she asks Samet not to tell Kenan about their dalliance. Since the entire point is to hurt Kenan, he tells Kenan within 30 seconds of returning home. I’m surprised he didn’t take a selfie from her bed and send it at the soonest possible fucking second.

Time has passed. Samet has had his revenge. He will leave this place, and go elsewhere, whether it’s back to the culture and civilisation of Istanbul, or, as should be his fate, to an even worse place than Erzurum. But with him he will take his awful personality and his terrible takes on things, and we are left in no doubt wherever he goes he will take misery with him.

And yet that doesn’t even feel like it’s the most problematic element of the flick. The whole storyline with the young Kurdish girl feels like red flag piled upon red flag. It’s worrying from the start, results in racial / ethnic abuse, directed towards making horrifying statements about her and ‘people like her’ to other kids, in order to stock enmity towards her, and then it gets worse. The final scenes between the characters, instead of forcing some kind of resolution or apology, make Samet look like a genuinely crazy person who should definitely not be allowed near children, or adults, for that matter.

It is unfair for me to put all that focus on that unpleasant character, however much time he takes up, because there is so much else going on around him, and so many other characters who get more than their fifteen minutes to shine, but if I keep going the review will be longer than the film. And that would be cruel, crueler than Samet, who’s a cruel piece of shit.

It’s a strong flick, but, damn, I was keen to be away from Samet by the end of it.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s some dry grasses on a hill, and then the flick ends

Lucky us.

7 times this is not the travel ad the government probably hoped it could be out of 10

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“But despite all, the whisper of that unique source inside reminds me how human it is to oppose and to feel bored” - About Dry Grasses