In his otherwise astute Cahiers du Cinéma review of About Dry Grasses, Josué Morel describes the main character of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest epic work, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), as a frustrated, badly loved, and, at times, angry man, who’s “perhaps even a pedophile.” While it can be seductive, sometimes convenient, to reduce the ambivalence of a characterization to something so clear, the manner in which Morel pins Samet down constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of Ceylan’s commitment to capturing, among other things, the dimensions of child-adult and pupil-teacher relations in all their complexity.
About Dry Grasses involves a complaint about transgressive behavior by Samet toward one of his female students, 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bagci), with whom he’s nurtured a caring bond within an institution where any expression of affection would be fundamentally at odds with its pedagogy and ethos. The plot of Ceylan’s film isn’t really that Samet is accused of pedophilia. Rather, he’s accused of inappropriate behavior toward a student who’s “in love” with him and has been outed as having written him a love letter. Sevim then turns on Samet, perhaps because she feels ridiculed for expressing her feelings in an environment where a woman’s desire—regardless of her age—seems to constitute a scandalous affront to patriarchal order.
It’s clear that Samet and Sevim’s relationship is entirely one of recognition. There’s kinship between these two individuals for whom prohibition—of imagination, emotion, and movement—is too painful to naturalize. About Dry Grasses is concerned above all else with the philosophical after-effects that this situation, the possibility of their bond, triggers. The film doesn’t lack narrative incident, but what really pricks us in the heart are the metaphorical registers, from the existential conversations that Samet has with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a politically conscious teacher from another institution, to the poetic use of voiceover, such as the one that accompanies Savim’s slow-motion turn toward the camera at one point.
Ceylan isn’t so much concerned with how a supposed abuse of power took place or how an abusive institution itself sets out to perform righteousness while wallowing in corruption as he is with how a young girl views the only adult in her midst who stands for something other than the cruelty of the law. That concern is evident, too, in how Samet looks back at Sevim, with a kindness that isn’t found on the faces of the school’s other adults, who all seem to work in unison to rob the children of their individuality. Throughout, About Dry Grasses seems to ask: Might it not be the school system itself—run entirely by men more interested in their own power, and in video games, than the educational project—that’s the real abuser?
Above all, the film captures how easy it is to deposit too much hope on the few who represent dissent, or freedom, when one is trapped. For About Dry Grasses, consistent with Ceylan’s previous film, The Wild Pear Tree, is essentially a story about being stuck: in a desolate place, a soul-destroying job, a broken body, an oppressive classroom, or a traumatic childhood.
Assigned a teaching position in rural eastern Anatolia, Samet yearns for the day when he can request his work transfer and teach in a less inhospitable environment. His office is literally a storage room. Sevim, meanwhile, may not know much of the world outside of her remote confines, but Samet awakens in her the possibility of escape from her subordinate condition—that of a victim of a school’s unannounced public searches of students’ backpacks.
Fascinatingly self-absorbed, Samet is in need of love himself, or a little tenderness, but not from a child. He looks for that in Nuray, who, unlike Samet, is able to transfer her work anywhere in Turkey despite, or rather, because of her amputated leg. Samet’s feelings for her are particularly awoken when he realizes that she’s been seeing his roommate, Kenan (Musab Ekici).
About Dry Grasses’s duration and Ceylan’s novelist’s ability to interweave interlocking narrative layers helps to keep the film from ever seeming topical. Ceylan develops the many moving threads and contradicting ends that make up a person’s life with delicate precision. Samet is portrayed as an assemblage of complicated parts. The institutional drama is only one of his preoccupations, along with the inability to find an audience for his insightful musings, an outlet for his artistic needs, a remedy for desolation and the suspicion of having botched his existence.
Hence the accuracy and pointed irony of the film’s English title. About Dry Grasses is just as much about the harshness of a landscape, which mirrors the spirit of its inhabitants, as it is about a barrage of much more elusive things, rendered tangible by an incredible aesthete’s hands: jealousy, shame, intellectual mediocrity, and patriarchy’s most vicious of tacit pacts.
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