About Dry Grasses knows precisely what its protagonist is. What it cannot see is what that knowledge costs the film — and who pays the cost.
About two hours into About Dry Grasses, Nuray turns and looks directly into the camera.
It is a genuine rupture. For nearly two hours we have been inside Samet’s world — his contempt for rural Anatolia, his wounded vanity, his elaborate self-justifications — and Ceylan has given us no relief from that perspective. Then Nuray, the English teacher who has been conducting a dinner conversation of extraordinary intellectual force with Samet, simply turns. She looks at us. She speaks to us, or through us, or past us into some space the film has not previously acknowledged. It is the single most electrifying moment in recent Turkish cinema, and it lasts perhaps ten minutes.
Then she goes back in. The film closes around her again. Samet reclaims the frame. The rupture seals.
What that rupture reveals — what it could not help revealing by happening at all — is the central tension the film carries without resolution for three and a quarter hours: Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made a film about a man he understands with merciless precision, and in doing so has had to contain a woman who exceeds that man’s capacity to understand her. The camera break is not a flourish. It is the film admitting, in formal terms, that Nuray cannot be held inside Samet’s story. She is too present, too alive, too formidably herself to remain in the frame he provides for her. So Ceylan breaks the frame. And then, because the film is Samet’s story and cannot finally be anything else, he puts it back together.
| Director | Nuri Bilge Ceylan |
|---|---|
| Year | 2023 |
| Runtime | 197 minutes |
| Cast | Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici, Ece Bağcı |
| Award | Best Actress (Merve Dizdar), Cannes 2023 |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel |
Samet is an art teacher in his fourth and final year of mandatory placement in a remote village in eastern Anatolia, and everything about his existence offends him. The landscape is too harsh, the students too limited, the local life too provincial for a man of his sensibility and ambition. He is waiting to be transferred to Istanbul, where his real life will finally begin. He has been waiting for four years. About Dry Grasses is Ceylan’s most extended portrait of a type he has been circling for decades: the educated man who has mistaken intellectual sophistication for wisdom, sensitivity to art for sensitivity to people, and the capacity to describe his own failures with precision for the willingness to change. Samet is a formidable creation, played by Deniz Celiloğlu with a sullen intelligence that keeps you watching even when you want to look away.
The film is not blind to any of this. Ceylan is pitiless in his anatomising of Samet’s self-regard, and the dinner sequence between Samet and Nuray is constructed as a systematic dismantling of every position Samet takes. Nuray challenges him on his politics, his relationship to his students, the meaning of sacrifice, the nature of commitment. She has lost a leg to a suicide bomber at a demonstration. She has given something of herself that Samet cannot imagine giving. Each exchange ends with Samet outmanoeuvred and recomposing himself for the next. He cannot win this conversation. He knows it. He continues anyway.
This is where the blog’s running thread arrives with its most complicated entry so far.
Two reviews ago, we observed that Afire spent an hour satirising a male artist who could not see past himself, then gave him a good book paid for with a woman’s death — and that Petzold did not notice the shape of his own resolution. One review ago, we noted that Bonello took James’s most interior argument and externalised it into a machine, removing the self-implication that makes the original story devastating. About Dry Grasses is a different case entirely. Ceylan sees Samet with complete clarity. The film does not mistake his protagonist’s suffering for profundity, does not reward his narcissism with transformation, does not let him escape into Istanbul or into art or into Nuray’s love. The dinner conversation ends with Nuray choosing Kenan. Samet walks home in the snow. The film’s final image has him exactly where it found him, but colder.
“The film knows everything about its protagonist. What it cannot do — and the camera break is the proof — is give us the story from the other side of the table. It can break its own form to let Nuray speak directly. What it cannot do is stay broken.”
And yet Samet’s story is still the one we follow. Not Nuray’s. Not Kenan’s. Certainly not Sevim’s.
Sevim is the student who files a misconduct report against Samet in the first act. She is the film’s most vulnerable figure — a child, a pupil, someone with the least power in every possible sense — and she receives the most perfunctory treatment. The film uses her accusation as the engine that traps Samet in the village and sets the story in motion, and then largely releases her from its attention. What she felt, what she understood, what she was doing when she gave Samet the photograph, what the accusation cost her in a village where the teacher holds significant social authority — the film is not interested in any of this. Sevim is the first female character to be displaced by Samet’s story, and she is the most defenceless one. Nuray at least gets the camera break. Sevim gets to be a plot mechanism and disappear.
The comparison that earns its place here is Ceylan’s own Winter Sleep (2014), the Palme d’Or winner that About Dry Grasses is most often measured against. Both films centre a man of considerable intelligence and considerable limitation, both use Chekhov’s dramatic grammar of long dialogue that reveals character through argument rather than action, and both place an articulate woman in the role of the man’s truest interlocutor — his wife Nihal in Winter Sleep, Nuray here. But Nihal is seen primarily from inside her husband Aydin’s withering condescension. We understand her through his misreading of her. Nuray is given so much more direct formal presence — the camera break, the Cannes prize, the dinner that wins every round — and yet she still exists, structurally, to illuminate what Samet lacks rather than to have her own story illuminated. The film has made the mirror larger and more beautiful. It is still a mirror.
Johan in Saraband also constructs an elaborate intellectual self-image that Bergman gently, tenderly dismantles. Samet is Johan without the gentleness — younger, sharper, without Bergman’s autumnal willingness to acknowledge his own failures with something approaching grace. What they share is the assumption that their suffering confers on them a depth that the people around them lack. Both films know this assumption is false. Both films are made from inside it anyway.
About Dry Grasses is enormous and serious and often magnificent: the snowscape photography is some of the most beautiful Ceylan has ever made, the dinner sequence is one of the great extended dialogues in recent cinema, and Merve Dizdar’s performance is everything Cannes said it was and more. The film earns its length in a way few films do. And Ceylan’s clarity about Samet is real, unflinching, and ultimately more honest than the films in this recent sequence that praised their protagonists without examining them.
But clarity about a limited man is not the same as giving us an unlimited one. The rupture in the frame was the film at its most honest: acknowledging, in the only way available to it, that there was a story here it could not tell. Then it healed the rupture and went on. Nuray turns back to Samet. The camera returns to Samet. The film ends in the snow with Samet.
She was right there. Looking back at us.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014): the Palme d’Or winner that About Dry Grasses is in extended conversation with, and the film that shows what Ceylan’s portrait of the self-regarding intellectual looks like when the woman in the frame has even less formal space to push back.
Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023): the film immediately preceding this one in the blog’s sequence, and the most direct counterpoint — a film that is blind to what it does with its female character, measured against one that sees exactly what it is doing and does it anyway.
UnspokenCinema publishes every week. No ratings. No rankings. Just what films reveal without meaning to.