About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne) ★★★1/2

Availability: No longer in theaters; available on multiple streaming and purchase platforms, including AppleTV, Prime Video, and Amazon Video. See JustWatch here for all options.

You Take Yourself with You

Samet, a disaffected art teacher in a village school in rural Turkey, is hard to like. Bored, unhappy, isolated, possibly in mid-life crisis, he can’t wait to get out of Incesu, this “dump,” as he calls it, ideally for Istanbul. “What am I doing here?” he asks. And, for one other character, at least, the answer is within Samet himself: “Wherever you go, your problems go with you.”

Above, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), returning from vacation to continue

his 4-year compulsory service teaching in a Turkish village

—set in the austere, stark, white landscape of rural Anatolia.

Deniz Celiloglu is entirely credible as the outsider who wrongly approaches the life to which he’s been consigned for his 4 years’ compulsory service in the hinterlands. And he makes the wrong decisions. He flirts with female students and ignores the boys, thoughtlessly risking censure and disgrace. He’s so jealous of his fellow teacher and housemate Kenan (Musab Ekici) that he betrays him. He lies continually and often joyfully, to the betrayed roommate, a girlfriend, the students, the principal—all to satisfy his own needs and preconceptions.

The narrative begins with Samet’s flirtation with one student in particular, 8th-grader Sevim (Ece Bagci); he puts his arm around her, favors her, and gives her gifts. Sevim later will accuse Samet and Kenan of inappropriate behavior. Much of the film’s underlying tension starts with mutual teasing between Samet and Sevim, a flirtation that the teacher—viewing himself as cosmopolitan compared to the villagers—finds harmless and reasonable. He tells Sevim their relationship reminds him of his first infatuation, with his literature teacher, a passion he never again felt as strongly.

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One might consider Samet a Shakespearian protagonist, a tragic figure.

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Though a liar, betrayer, ogler of young girls, pessimist, and self-isolator (he creates an office for himself, away from the teachers’ lounge, in a janitor’s storeroom), Samet’s ruminations about his life (the only one that interests him) are universal and complex, and driven by his own flaws and hubris. One might consider him a Shakespearian protagonist, a tragic figure. Nuray, a mature, intensely self-aware teacher at another school in the area (Merve Dizdar, who in 2024 won Best Actress at Cannes for this role), talks truth to Samet and does her best to elicit from him a modicum of self-understanding. Under Nuray’s interrogation, Samet acknowledges that he has no inclinations to a greater good, no interest in charity, no wish to participate in a cause or belong to a political organization, no thirst for connections to people or place. In his mid-thirties, he’s for “freedom,” freedom for himself, of course. Although Nurat disagrees with Samet on almost every dimension, they share, along with food and red wine, “the weariness of hope.”

Samet, a pessimist, center, and Kenan (Musab Ekici), next to him at right,

an optimist, respond very differently to the probing questions

of a third teacher, Nuray (Cannes-winner Merve Dizdar).

The 3-hour-plus running time is in part due to 2 long scenes mid-way through. One features Samet, a local shopkeeper, and a radicalized young man. They meet in the shopkeeper’s office, since the village appears to have no third spaces: no coffee shop, no bar. The other lengthy scene is just Samet and Nuray at her dining room table, with overtones of “My Dinner with Andre” (1981). Cannes-winning director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (for 2014’s “Winter Sleep”), startlingly breaks the fourth wall in the Samet/Nuray pas de deux, perhaps to show us that Samet, a character who cannot bring himself to take action, is always performing rather than being.

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Director Celan startlingly breaks the fourth wall in the Samet/Nuray pas de deux.

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Nuray’s primary role in the story is to add to our knowledge of Samet’s troubled perspective; she has no scenes that do not include him. Nonetheless, she is a significant character, not quite a feminist yet engaged with issues of gender and sexuality, trying to determine—as a strong and attractive woman with one leg, the other blown off in a terrorist incident, now hosting Samet in her apartment—what strengths remain to her in her relationships with men.

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Nuray is trying to determine—as a strong and attractive woman with one leg, the other blown off in a terrorist incident—what strengths remain to her in her relationships with men.

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Ceylan’s film, based on a diary kept by co-writer Akin Aksu during his compulsory service in Anatolia, situates itself within several contemporary thematic frames. Like Jérémie in the recent “Misericordia” and the country-less Arthur in Italy’s “La Chimera” (2023), Samet is the consummate outsider, raising problems for himself and the community because he brings disparate values and worldly criticism to a closed milieu. As in similar films, the narrative begins by following a teacher who finds himself or herself at odds with students and the educational hierarchy, often by being too friendly or “helping” a student or students. In Germany’s “The Teachers’ Lounge” (2023), it’s the Polish teacher assisting a Muslim student; in the Cannes-winning “The Class” (2008), it’s the sophisticated teacher calling a couple of immigrant students “skanks.”

At right, the flirtatious 14-year-old Sevim (Ece Bagci), in Samet's office, has a "transcendence" her teacher Samet is trying to capture.

Ceylan’s narrative may open like these predecessors, but it follows its own path. The Samet/Sevim attraction-rejection-attraction is not the only story line, not even the principal one. While challenging the viewer, Ceylan tells an engrossing story that takes unpredictable twists and turns.

The film is compelling because it raises profound questions in a character with whom one does not easily identify. Though admittedly not much of an artist, Samet takes photographs, first of single villagers, then of villagers at work (a carter and his horse), then of 2 people together, all against the stark, austere, snow-covered landscape. It’s a cold, unforgiving place. The villagers are an embittered bunch, disgusted with corruption and politics, tyrannized by police and bureaucrats. Maybe Samet is right that such an environment is harmful to the human spirit. Yet the inhabitants carry on. As the photographs reveal, they—unlike Samet—are grounded.

In the end, as Samet prepares to leave the village (perhaps for mythic Istanbul), he  reflects on the “transcendence” that he hoped Sevim would imbue in him. Ascending a steep hill, he looks down and, for the first time, notices the desiccated vegetation beneath his boots. Alienated from others, from ideas, from place, from a satisfying sense of self, he grasps, if momentarily, what he has become: just another strand of the “dry grasses” of rural Anatolia.

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She says: The 197 minutes shouldn’t be a deterrent to this excellent film. While watching at home has its disadvantages (a theater would be better for many dark scenes and for medium shots where the faces would be clearer), you can watch it over a couple sittings. Not ideal, but less intimidating.

He says: A study of people and their environment, nurture and nature, a character and a place. Overly long, cumulatively satisfying.

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Date: 2024 (US release)

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Starring: Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici, Ece Bagci

Runtime: 197 minutes

Country: Turkey

Language: Turkish, with English subtitles

Other Awards: 15 wins and 10 other nominations (including for the Cannes Palme d’Or)