About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

 

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Director and lead cast

Merve Dizdar accepting Best Actress prize at Cannes

ABOUT DRY GRASSES (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)                    B+                                                Turkey  France  Germany  Sweden  (197 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

It seems to me that everything beautiful in this world gets stuck in the webs we weave before it ever reaches us.                  —Nuray (Merve Dizdar)

There are any number of winter films that beautifully capture the snowy landscapes, like Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna) (1963), František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966), Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Larissa Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), the Coen brother’s Fargo (1996), Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Alan Rickman’s THE WINTER GUEST (1997), Tomas Alfredson’s vampire film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008), Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009), or Debra Granik’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone.  Directly influenced by the visual language of Dreyer, Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, and Kiarostami, Ceylan makes intelligent, self-reflective, and highly observant films, revealing an awareness of time and space, creating metaphysical moments with an inherent understanding of the power of acting, where what’s most essential are the inner changes experienced by the characters, with importance given to sound design rather than music.  The opening of this film proves why Ceylan is one of cinema’s great landscape artists, set in an endlessly bleak snowy panorama in the middle of nowhere, where the sky and earth are blindingly white, as a lone figure is just a small dot engulfed by a vast wintry landscape as he trudges through the snow, with the crunch of his boots the only sound heard, making his way into a small town after being dropped off by a bus at a remote highway location, which beautifully encapsulates the chilly reception we are about to witness, like entering the world of Bruegel’s painting The Hunters in the Snow, or the allegorical landscapes of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), emphasizing the uniquely complex individuality in our responses to the natural world, while also discovering man holds no power over nature.  Watching the novelistic filmmaking of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with so many subtitled words to read on the screen, is the equivalent of reading a Russian novel, like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), a Dostoyevskian Crime and Punishment exposé, and Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu) (2014), combining ideas from two Chekhov short stories, The Wife and Excellent People, also a scene from The Brother’s Karamozov, as they are slow, contemplative experiences that are extremely literary, with endless dialogue exploring the rich detail of the character’s inner lives, requiring a great deal of patience due to the more than three-hour running time.  His films seem to be getting even more existential, exploring the plight of a man alone in the universe, questioning what kind of world we live in.  A common factor in Ceylan films is probing toxic masculinity in an entrenched patriarchal society that allows no wiggle room for dissent, featuring despicable, deeply insufferable lead protagonists whose contemptible behavior can be overly misanthropic, which challenges viewers to examine their own values and how well any of us can live up to them, as it is human to be flawed, to make mistakes, bad judgments, and even be the subject of deplorable behavior.  The question is what do we learn from it?  Are we capable of change?  That seems to be the driving force behind the film, which explores the darker side of characters who seem to be living in a continual state of exhaustion, having grown weary from fighting for the causes they believe in, or already given up, while also strangely reflective of the allure of Stalinism to Eastern European intellectuals in the 50’s and 60’s, beautifully described by Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz in The Captive Mind.  Ceylan has reportedly great interest in 19th century Russian literature, inspired by writers like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov who created epic narratives about how people view their lives, how they justify their actions, and what they think they should do.  They were written during a time when Russian society was conflicted by the influence of modern Westernization contrasted against the traditions of Russian orthodoxy.  Both Russia and Turkey are diverse, authoritarian nations, both caught between the East and the West, where Turkey is experiencing the same issues of trying to Westernize while keeping its Islamic traditions, as 99% of the population is Muslim, with nearly 90% of Turks saying religion plays an important role in their life, most believing it is necessary to believe in God to be moral.  Turkey has a secular constitution, with no official state religion, but the role of religion within the state has become a divisive issue in a country ruled by a cruel, autocratic leader for two decades.  Accordingly, there is a spiritual abyss at the center of the film.  Prone to over-intellectualizing, this somehow feels more down to earth than any of his more recent films, but it still revels in the dogged reverence of an arthouse cinema that barely exists anymore, that may be gone in our lifetimes.  For instance, would today’s generation have the patience for Béla Tarr or Tarkovsky, who are products of their times, something this director makes light of in DISTANT (2002), a film that initially brought him international acclaim.

A regular fixture at Cannes since his debut short KOZA (Cocoon) in 1995, where all seven of his feature films have been selected into Cannes competition, winning awards for five of them, something unimaginable for most filmmakers, as critics and audiences alike know what to expect when it comes to Ceylan’s films, overly somber intellectual meditations on the disappointments of life, where his last three films have gotten more talkative, all running more than three hours, though they can be inscrutably detailed and precise, yet also obtuse and ponderous, while each frame is painterly in its composition.  Certainly one of the driving forces is working with his longtime cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki, a collaborator in all his features since CLIMATES (2006), along with producer Zeynep Özbatur Atakan, but both are absent here, working instead with cinematographers Kürşat Üresin and Cevahir Şahin, with Mediha Didem Türemen producing, while German filmmaker Maren Ade is also listed as a co-producer.  The lengthy story, adapted by the director (who started out as a photographer) and his wife Ebru Ceylan, who also provided still photographs (featured in gallery exhibitions, ebru ceylan "night of the world"), is based on the diary of cowriter and art teacher Akin Aksu that he kept during his 3-year-long compulsory service out in the hinterlands.  Set in Erzurum in eastern Anatolia, which has a large mostly impoverished Kurdish population, it is the highest major city in Turkey, located on an elevated plateau sitting at 6,400 feet above sea level surrounded by several mountain ranges, as the film follows Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an alienated teacher who returns back for the winter term after taking his school break in Istanbul, never hiding his contempt for this backwater region and the people living in it, dreaming only of the day he can get out of there, where he teaches art to a classroom filled with the young children of farmers, but he’s coming to an end of his 4-year term, which allows him to put in a transfer for Istanbul.  His cynical viewpoint and short fuse only point to the tip of the iceberg, as underneath he’s fuming with discontent, filled with self-loathing and regret, confronting his own ideals, dreams, selfishness, cowardice, and comfort, thinking happiness is a delusion, feeling intellectually superior to everyone around him, which allows him to act despicably, having a habit of undermining and devaluing others, literally sucking the life blood out of everyone around him.  Samet stopped painting some time ago, so now he takes pictures of local villagers, yet we hear him continually asking himself “What am I still doing here?”  There is trauma in his current state of existence, going to great lengths to avoid any possibility of love, which may have something to do with the collapse of a liberal democracy in the country, and while it’s not openly political, it may be the most political film in the director’s career.  This is about the disillusionment of youth and lost dreams, dwelling on the importance of an individual who no longer believes in anything, but at what cost, plagued by ennui and inaction, feeling darker than his other films, resembling the probing dialogue-based structure of Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu), while the entrenched disillusionment matches that same feeling from the end of the 60’s, when an era of hope and optimism came crashing back to reality, expressing “how ideals can in time turn into disappointments,” as reflected by Jean Eustache’s monumental The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973).  In the end Samet might end up like Aydin of Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu), where nothing is waiting for him in Istanbul.  While he’s got no faith in art or politics, he likes to hang out, drink, and argue with two supposedly disreputable leftists, the older and more measured Vahit (Yüksel Aksu), who has experience under his belt, and the younger Feyyaz (Münir Can Cindoruk), a Kurdish resistance sympathizer who views himself as something of a radical, as the police took his father away at a young age, filling him with such rage that it left him searching for answers.  While he has no recollection of the police abducting his father from his own bed, what he remembers is the flicker on the ceiling above the fire stove, growing intensely philosophical, “It’s not about what has happened, it’s about what’s beyond the visible, what goes on inside.”  Think of this as one of Éric Rohmer’s moral tales, yet occurring in a repressed political climate that breeds authoritarianism and radical terrorism, becoming instead an exposé on tired idealism and “the weariness of hope.”  The stark difference is just shocking.  

Samet lives with a roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici), a teacher at the same school, feigning interest in order to minimize friction, but there’s no love lost between them from Samet’s point of view, as there’s always an underlying resentment, while Kenan, on the other hand, believes they are true friends.  The only exception to his blanket disinterest lies in one of his students, 8th grader Sevim (Ece Bağcı), seemingly smarter than the others, showing her preferential treatment both in and out of class, even bringing her gifts, seen walking arm-in-arm with her down the school’s corridor, blurring the boundaries between what constitutes crossing the line, but when he refuses to return a confiscated love letter she wrote, presumably to him, she spitefully exposes them both for “inappropriate contact,” where the inner workings of the bureaucratic hierarchy don’t really take it that seriously, not wanting to bring attention to the school, turning into an absurdly vague Kafkaesque inquiry where they refuse to provide any details, so Samet grows defensive and highly indignant, where you can tell he’s steaming inside, once again blaming the backwater ineptitude of the place, more than anything wanting out, feeling stuck, as if imprisoned in a claustrophobic fog where he trusts no one.  Warned not to seek retribution against his accuser, or violate terms of confidentiality, he does anyway, but in his own abusive way, turning against Sevim in class, openly punishing and intimidating her, which takes the other students by surprise, as she was always his favorite.  This incident eats at Samet in ways we can’t even fathom, as he has no control over it, but it feels like the culmination of years of cynicism and exasperation, where he’s literally suffocating from his own bitterness.  Samet’s obsession with this young girl is paralleled with his meeting another teacher on the Internet from a neighboring village, Nuray (Merve Dizdar).  While he envies her position in a larger school, thinking that should be him, his initial interest sours, so he introduces her to Kenan, who’s immediately attracted, ABOUT DRY GRASSES - Official Clip YouTube (2:14).  Splitting her time between the two men, Nuray has a quiet intelligence and sensitivity, but she also wears a prosthetic leg, as she was the victim of a terrorist bomb attack at a peace rally in Ankara (2015 Ankara bombings), having paid a great price for ideals that she has not abandoned (in contrast to Samet), still believing in solidarity and organized struggle, but now walks with a limp.  That doesn’t seem to bother Kenan, who secretly continues to see her afterwards, but doesn’t share this with Samet, so it’s their own little secret.  Only when Samet happens to see them together, compounded by the fact Kenan tells him nothing about it, something else kicks in, with a jealous Samet deviously deciding he must have her, so he intentionally goes behind his friend’s back and tries to seduce her in a long, involved sequence that may as well be the centerpiece of the film, filled with a lengthy wine-fueled conversation with plenty of suspense and anticipation, where she actually stands up to him, attacking his moral failings, challenging his apathy and complacency and self-justification, and even chastises him “If you think you’ll be happy when you go to Istanbul, you’re wrong.  Because wherever a person goes, they take themselves with them.”  The audience becomes complicit with this seduction, as we form our own opinions on the moral departures of their behavior, that takes on even greater significance when Samet walks to the rest room and takes a (Viagra?) pill out of his pocket, bringing viewers with him as he walks through what is obviously a movie set, breaking a fourth wall, reminding us of Brechtian aesthetics, as we see the makings of the movie behind the scenes, reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), only to return to her waiting in the darkened bedroom with her amputated leg exposed.  This is the longest and most provocative sequence of the film, as it’s a blatant betrayal of his friend, and the height of supreme arrogance, but it asks what price you are willing to pay to serve your own narcissistic interests, as we wonder what kind of freedom that is.  While she appears to have a secondary role, Merve Dizdar was awarded the Best Actress prize at Cannes, chosen over Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute) and Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things (La passion de Dodin Bouffant), as she is the catalyst for much of what happens, someone we haven’t seen in Ceylan’s cinema before, with a multitude of unanswered questions surrounding her character and the unspoken relationship with the two men.  Given Turkey’s abysmal record when it comes to women’s rights, where femicides have been on the rise, it is difficult not to see Nuray and Sevim as kindred spirits, as it is the female characters who actually drive the story.  An epilogue sequence transitions directly into summer, with a voiceover narration from Samet that may feel less than satisfying, suffering from the weight of his own self-absorbed existence, getting into the mindset of an ineffectually petty and Superfluous man, though he continues to have such a lofty opinion of himself, rendering judgment from on high, which reflects his outlook on the world around him, unable to establish any meaningful relationships with either humans or with nature.  The final compositions are shot in and around the ruins of Karakuş Tumulus (one of the pillars has since collapsed from an earthquake killing more than 40,000 people, Thousands dead, millions displaced: the earthquake fallout ...).  Winter is so prominent here that the dry grasses of summer never have a chance to grow, as they are quickly buried under snow (a veiled reference to Erdoğan’s regime).   

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Closet Picks YouTube (4:35)