About Dry Grasses

About Dry Grasses

Everyone is a liar. They lie out of malice, to protect themselves or keep from hurting someone else’s feelings lies grease the wheels or corrode the gears of social interaction. But it’s in this liminal space between absolute certainty an impossible utopia and the most outrageous falsity that what really matters resides: how an event makes us feel trumps the importance of the facts themselves.

This latest engrossingly verbose three-hour opus from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, “About Dry Grasses,” spends its time warning us that every truth is partial because it’s told from a perspective. Even our conclusions about world and self must be suspect, for neither hope nor despair can be taken at face value.

It’s been four years since Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), an art teacher, has returned to Incesu, a makeshift rural town in eastern Turkey so large it feels improvised on the spot during a long lunch by God himself. (He refers to it as “this hellhole” more than once.) The government sent him here for reasons unexplained; he would rather have been posted in Istanbul. Within minutes, Ceylan lets us know that each line of dialogue or scene no matter how stimulatingly commonplace will prove thematically significant later on.

As teachers gather at the end of recess, their banter about a vendor whose perfumes he swears are genuine but admits his tracksuits are fake quickly becomes this: To assuage his customers’ doubts, thinks Samet, he tells one small truth to hide one larger lie: It’s all illegal.

Because he teaches children and is from “the city,” Samet enjoys some prestige around town with both soldiers in league with the regime and local dissidents who wish they weren’t living under one. That middle ground between oppressors and idealists is where this misanthropic teacher feels safest. Cowardly in his self-absorption, he takes an apolitical stance.

Most of Samet’s students like him even Sevim (Ece Bagci), a girl he condescends to and privately considers smarter than most in his class. Until one day a random search turns up a love letter from her backpack, which Samet claims not to have a lie she doesn’t believe.

So the young pupil retaliates against that breach of trust with another untruth that this time implicates not only Samet’s reputation but also that of Kenan (Musab Ekici), his best friend and roommate. Throughout the ordeal, Samet knows it’s wrong to give presents or show favoritism toward certain students but won’t admit it, telling himself his intentions were pure.

“What’s friendship without some risk or sacrifice?” Samet tells Tolga (Erdem Senocak), the phys ed teacher who refuses to share what he knows about Sevim’s accusations. But for all Samet asks those around him to break rules as proof of their loyalty, as unquestioning displays of faith in his own innocence, he betrays that supposed sacredness of brotherhood every time it serves his narrative better not kept.

His smirk is infuriating because there’s nothing behind it; Celiloglu makes sure we see that this character is off-putting yes but not amoral or lacking for empathy so much as arrogant and patronizing toward these uneducated people and their outdated worldviews.

Sure, Samet tells plenty of lies, but being brutally honest doing the opposite can be just as hurtful.

Enraged at Sevim’s betrayal, he tells the rowdy class they’ll never grow into anything more than farmers who produce crops for the rich to eat.

That’s likely a hard truth statistically, but he has to lie and tell them they can overcome it. He hopes that at least one of them will be inspired enough by this to beat the odds. Instead, he sounds like a dictator trying to silence the opposition. Speaking of his enemies as people deserving collective scorn in this case elementary school girls.

Ceylan makes everyday encounters into verbal battlegrounds for characters’ most deeply rooted fears or ugliest instincts. This is never truer than in scenes with Semat and Kenan’s new left-wing friend Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a former military woman turned teacher who lost her right leg in an explosion. The scenes are steadily paced, richly intellectual, and absorbingly acted; their expansive running time is irrelevant.

When she says she’s bought a car, Kenan responds with genuine excitement: We hear him rejoice, cut to her reacting in delight, then the next shot shows Samet looking at Kenan with disgust over his earnestness a wordless moment of villainy; when he finally speaks his companions don’t respond, they are staring intently at each other; Samet recognizes a connection is brewing; he is jealous not because he wants to date her but because others can experience joy; Samet also reviles knowing that Nuray finds Kenan raised in this land and whom he judges unculture more interesting than him.

Over dinner another night comes the most riveting ideological duel in the film Ceylan’s quietly explosive dialogue rouses the mind. Nuray sees through Samet’s poisonous politeness used to disguise staunch selfishness; voiced by the extraordinarily restrained Dizdar (who won Cannes’ Best Actress award for this turn), she gives voice to galvanizing lines advocating for community while he defends his inaction as the sensible choice “Shall I tell the truth or try to make you happy?” Samet responds to her inquiries about what kind of person he thinks he is. But though motives differ, Nuray sins of concealment too when she asks him not to speak of their one-on-one evening as not to hurt Kenan.

Ceylan constantly reminds us that art doesn’t trade in veracity since it’s a representation of a flawed person’s point of view and not the whole picture while expounding on his thesis about distrust. There are the photographs Samet takes of the town’s humble residents, which give way to montages of tableaux vivants these static images can only capture what’s visible in an instant, not each person’s history of bad deeds and acts kindness.

Later, upon seeing Nuray’s paintings of her family, sounds of people laughing, speaking, existing emerge as if to note there are entire lives lived outside what her brush can convey and that these artistic interpretations of her loved ones are symbolic artifacts showing only how she sees them not who they truly were. Even the ruins left behind by ancient civilizations only reveal glimpses into who they were.

Near its conclusion Ceylan stuns with a moment where he briefly breaks the spell-of-fiction to once-again affirm this film’s position that images on canvases or in the metaphorical sense only contain a minuscule fraction of truth; particularly those we project ourselves to be in others’ eyes.

He also suggests that film, out of all the art forms, is perhaps the most deceptive. We recognize what appears on screen as a concoction of artificiality and manipulation, but suspend our disbelief in order to believe in movies the good ones, at least emotionally.

But there’s value in choosing a side and believing in flawed ideals, Ceylan argues. The other option; what has eaten away at Samet’s soul; is taking it as given that nothing can change. Those people who follow their most fervent delusions are the only ones who can change history even if it means going against what has been established as immutable.

That may be why Sevim attracts Samet so much (or Nuray does), because they seem to have overcome the kinds of things which would have embittered them whilst he indulges his worst self-loathing. He dreads hope because hope means disappointment. In fact nothing is ever as beautiful or as ugly as it seems not even the land itself.

The bitterest months almost bury our memories of better times.

Watch About Dry Grasses For Free On Gomovies.