Reviews
About Dry Grasses
Reviewed by Stephen Pye
Nuri Ceylan's latest film 'About Dry Grasses' was shown to our smallest audience for some while on Sunday evening. A number of our films have filled the Alhambra this season, but this was always destined to have the same number of souls as the average Church of England congregation!
First of all it's not really about dry grasses, the title itself merely puts the film firmly in the 'art-house' category. The film's length (197 minutes) ensured many of our regulars ended up watching 'Conclave' instead, fair enough, but this film was one of our season's highlights. Two people wished it had been longer, and the film is still playing in my head.
Set in the beautiful snowy wastes of Northern Anatolia it concerns an art teacher (Samet) who has to fulfil a stint of four years teaching in the countryside before he can return to Istanbul. He is embittered, mostly morose, and in many ways quite unfathomable, not atypical for a Ceylan character. He has a favourite female student (Sevim) to whom he shows undue attention, which eventually leads to accusations against him. He appears to be innocent, but maybe protests too much? We are left feeling uneasy about him.
He strikes up a relationship with a teacher in a nearby town (Nuray) who has lost her leg in a suicide bomb attack. She is clearly cleverer and more interesting than he is, and he appears only to be in the relationship to undermine his fellow housemate, also a teacher in his school.
The film feels as if it is almost in real time, so much so that in a long conversation with Nuray in her apartment he walks off the set into the production area, thereby using the 'fourth wall' to remind us that this is actually a film!
Since 2003 Ceylan has amassed a corpus of work which now places him at the forefront of modern film directors and will surely guarantee his entry into the pantheon of greats he so admires, namely Tarkovsky, Renoir and Bergman. His abiding influence though is Anton Chekhov, and his films are visual representations of Chekovian short stories, portraying disillusioned individuals trying to make the most of “our little life”. In so doing they often fail; yet as the film demonstrates, and actually articulates, at the end there is the possibility of transcendence.
As our retiring scores for the film indicated "we happy few" experienced just that!
First of all it's not really about dry grasses, the title itself merely puts the film firmly in the 'art-house' category. The film's length (197 minutes) ensured many of our regulars ended up watching 'Conclave' instead, fair enough, but this film was one of our season's highlights. Two people wished it had been longer, and the film is still playing in my head.
Set in the beautiful snowy wastes of Northern Anatolia it concerns an art teacher (Samet) who has to fulfil a stint of four years teaching in the countryside before he can return to Istanbul. He is embittered, mostly morose, and in many ways quite unfathomable, not atypical for a Ceylan character. He has a favourite female student (Sevim) to whom he shows undue attention, which eventually leads to accusations against him. He appears to be innocent, but maybe protests too much? We are left feeling uneasy about him.
He strikes up a relationship with a teacher in a nearby town (Nuray) who has lost her leg in a suicide bomb attack. She is clearly cleverer and more interesting than he is, and he appears only to be in the relationship to undermine his fellow housemate, also a teacher in his school.
The film feels as if it is almost in real time, so much so that in a long conversation with Nuray in her apartment he walks off the set into the production area, thereby using the 'fourth wall' to remind us that this is actually a film!
Since 2003 Ceylan has amassed a corpus of work which now places him at the forefront of modern film directors and will surely guarantee his entry into the pantheon of greats he so admires, namely Tarkovsky, Renoir and Bergman. His abiding influence though is Anton Chekhov, and his films are visual representations of Chekovian short stories, portraying disillusioned individuals trying to make the most of “our little life”. In so doing they often fail; yet as the film demonstrates, and actually articulates, at the end there is the possibility of transcendence.
As our retiring scores for the film indicated "we happy few" experienced just that!