About Dry Grasses is quintessential slow cinema

This Turkish film is deeply challenging, even boring at times. But it is pretty much a masterpiece.

As discouraging art-house titles go, About Dry Grasses is a cracker, right up there for me with an early Ozu, I Was Born, But… . In almost every other way too, the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ninth feature would seem to make the perfectly pretentious date movie in a Woody Allen comedy.

It is three hours 17 minutes long. It is set in one of the bleakest places ever, a small town, Ĭncesu, in the province of Erzurum in Turkey’s Eastern Anatolia, on a high steppe blanketed in snow for six months each winter. It’s about the travails of a disgruntled 30-something schoolteacher, Samet, stranded in this hell-hole on a compulsory four-year posting (these places have to have their own schools because for much of the year bussing the kids elsewhere is impossible).

Samet gets inappropriately involved with his pupil, 14-year-old Sevim, and in trouble with the authorities. Meanwhile he pursues another teacher, the attractive, independent Nuray, who lost a leg in a terrorist bombing in Ankara in 2015 – not because he fancies her but because he’s jealous of her relationship with his roommate, Kenan, who is simple but better looking and has a car.

This is quintessential slow cinema. The acting is naturalistic, the lighting low, the scenes all protracted, taking place almost in real time. (“I try not to cut it as much as possible,” says Ceylan.) The camera moves only when necessary. Although there are lengthy silences, the film is also very talky. The central debate between Samet and Nuray, when he turns up for dinner at her flat alone, having omitted to tell Kenan he was invited too, lasts a full half-hour as she attacks him for his selfishness while he manoeuvres her bedwards. The film is, of course, subtitled, distracting with such a cascade of dialogue. The eye sticks to the bottom of the screen instead of absorbing the full picture.

And yet About Dry Grasses becomes wholly engaging, deeply challenging to the viewer’s own sense of self and purpose. It’s pretty much a masterpiece, standing comparison with the work of the auteurs Ceylan most admires: Bresson, Tarkovsky, Antonioni – and indeed Ozu. More than that, it invites comparison with the Russian novelists Ceylan always cites as being the making of him, saying that, while his life was never the same after reading Crime and Punishment at 19, “Chekhov is closer to my own soul”.

Notwithstanding that his 2014 Palme d’Or-winning film Winter Sleep was actually based on a Chekhov story, About Dry Grasses is perhaps the most Chekhovian film ever, wryly acknowledged by its presentation of a gun that never does go off (contrary to the famous dictum). “From the day I arrive, I’ve only thought about leaving,” says Samet, believing Istanbul, rather than Moscow, to be the answer. Nuray reproves him: “Wherever you go, your problems go with you.”

The film – scripted by Ceylan, his wife, Ebru, and Akin Aksu, on whose journals from his time as a teacher it is loosely based – exposes Samet implacably. He lies to Sevim about whether or not a confiscated love letter she has written has been destroyed. He takes out his frustration on the children while teaching them art, shouting: “None of you will become artists. You’ll plant potatoes and sugarbeets, so the rich live comfortably. Write what you like! What the hell am I doing here?”

When Nuray challenges him to declare what he believes in, Samet offers only: “I’m not overly fond of anything.” Yet Deniz Celiloğlu miraculously conjures our sympathy for Samet in his sadness and disappointment. Merve Dizdar (whose performance won her Best Actress at Cannes) is equally complex as Nuray; Ece Bağci as Sevim is alive with the spirit and independence that Samet lacks.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films may seem deliberately boring – “boredom has the potential to put people in the right mental state to able to sense the hardest truths,” he asserts – but they are always convincing, and steadily become as involving as the Russian novels they emulate. It would be a waste to see About Dry Grasses anywhere other than on the largest screen, in the darkest cinema. It not only repays the time, it makes a change of pace nothing less than a moral recalibration.

Alternatively this week, there’s the blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine, in which different superhero universes collide. Ryan Reynolds’s abusive mutant pairs up with Hugh Jackman’s resurrected claw-man, Disney having acquired first Marvel (Wolverine) in 2009 and then 20th Century Fox (Deadpool) in 2019. But artistic reasons predominate, no doubt…

“About Dry Grasses” is in cinemas now

[See also: Twisters makes tornadoes great again]