Turkey, France, Germany, 2023
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
With Deniz Celiloğlu (Samet), Merve Dizdar (Nuray), Musab Ekici (Kenan), Ece Bağcı (Sevim), Onur Berk Arslanoğlu (Bekir), Yüksel Aksu (Vahit), Münir Can Cindoruk (Feyyaz)
Despite the stern, slightly sullen face, he comes across as a congenial fellow, someone who is well known and liked in this small town of Eastern Anatolia. He makes his way deliberately through the streets or across the court of the junior high school, unfazed by the deep layers of snow left by the harsh winter, advancing towards a camera eager to observe him getting hailed or starting a chat. He is on friendly terms with a host of different folks, from drifter Feyyaz to veterinarian Vahit, from the officer commanding the local section of the Turkish gendarmerie, who offers him to meet a pretty woman since staying a bachelor is not the right thing to do, to the occasional farmer who would offer him a ride on his hay-loaded, horse-drawn sledge.
The bond is even stronger and warmer at the junior high school, where he teaches drawing and the visual arts. He banters gladly with the janitor and teases his female colleagues, although an underlying streak of fierce professional criticism can be detected. He gets along very well with his roommate, another professor in his late 30s and early 40s, who teaches sociology, Kenan. The relations are rather good with his pupils, he looks more tempted to be a sympathetic, relaxed instructor than a tough stickler for rules and discipline. There is even one student, a radiant, smiling, slightly impish girl named Sevim, that seems quite close to him, someone he is really fond of and eager to help – but of course he gently warns her their relation as it stands should not be noticed by others. He thus seems aware a necessary distance may be overlooked but there is nothing to fear, he reckons, even if a boy would complain during a class that Sevim and her friends are too often interrogated by the professor, hinting at another underlying tension beneath the benevolent facade put up by the professor. Anyway, the cheerful relation he entertains with Sevim fits with that broader pattern long scenes painstakingly depicts, a decent guy fully part of the community he likes.
Except that Samet does not like this community at all. The sullen face is no quirk or exaggeration: it signals a deep discontent director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has defined precisely though eloquently in his new film’s press notes. “In the setting of a remote region rendered mute by historical imperatives, we have tried to convey the dry and bland flavor of the affairs developed in the course of compulsory services, the immutable insistence of the fate of the teaching profession on only barely getting by, and the relationship between high and pure ideals and the brutal ruthlessness of harsh reality”. Put more plainly, Samet resents being in a distant corner of his country and not in a fine school of the towering and terrific Istanbul.
This contempt for the place he belongs to for the moment even puts him in a quandary, sentimentally speaking. As the gendarme has guessed, he would like to have a romantic, or perhaps more crudely, a sex partner and does get in touch, through a dating application, with a fellow professor working in the area, who is still recovering from the terrorist attack she was victim of, Nuray. But if the first meeting goes down well, he would days later invite his roommate and friend to meet her, reckoning Nuray and Kenan have much in common, starting with the fact she like the region, even if she is not a native, and so does he, since he is a native. The main reason, however, is that he does not want to commit himself to someone living in the area – but then, perhaps he does not want to commit at all.
The course of his boring life takes an unexpected turn the day the school principal, Bekir, and another professor, conduct a search of the satchels and bags of Samet’s students to check if they are not secretly carrying stuff rules and a stringent morality ban from the school’s premises. A diary, a mirror, and a love letter are found in Sevim’s satchel, suggesting a promiscuity and a vanity that the staff deem shameful. Samet later manages to get back the stuff and reads the letter. He is still perusing it when Sevim knocks at his small office’s door. And Samet would do what he should not: he lies, claiming the letter has been thrown away. She refuses to believe him while the audience is fully aware of how brazen and stupid his attitude is.
Sevim would find a way to avenge herself, tarnishing his image of a faultless and decent professor, sheltered by the rules about reporting improper conduct calling for investigation – Bekir can set off the alarm but he must not tell Sevim and Kenan, who is also accused of the same indecency, who denounces them. The incident drives Samet mad and his uglier face is quickly in fully display. The congenial professor becomes the harshest and most deprecating of the staff.
And wickedness extends into his private life: Samet cannot fail to notice how damn well Nuray and Kenan get on, and neither can the audience watching smartly composed shots observing how the three interact in their talks, including how one can look at the others. And he becomes peeved, perhaps jealous, and ends up manipulating and lying to have a dinner face to face with Nuray, willfully excluding Kenan. What could have been a nice relationship between three colleagues quickly turn into a far more complex and harrowing confrontation, with Samet willfully hurting Kenan’s pride while basking in the memory of the night he spent with Nuray. Once again, Samet’s frustration, confusion, and conspicuous selfishness take over his rationality and caution. Whither will his acts and dissatisfaction lead him and those suffering at his hands around him?
Even as the camera observes closely Samet pathetically sliding on a slippery slope Ceylan delves deeper and deeper into the contradictions and emotions of an intellectual character fearing to be passed over, unsure about his stance and his desire, grappling with the precise and demanding task of staying in touch with his fellows Turks even though they drive him mad. Samet may have preposterous and unpalatable behaviors and words and yet it is not simply the withering portrayal of a rage or a contempt. It is far more nuanced than such a clear-cut narrative, capturing paradox and confusion, with revealing an even more elaborate and wider picture prevailing over articulating plainly what he experiences – the audience is required to pay attention, to show patience, to make the effort to reach out, and does not get the relatable and readable elements they could expect, and have trained to obtain.
The evening Samet spends dining with Nuray at her apartment is a strikingly long and complex sequence starting in the dark of a snowy street and ending in the fresh dawn of a cozy bedroom. It is a real climax not only for the lead character but also for the development of the director’s art. Increasingly passionate and testy exchanges with an overconfident and inquisitive Nuray and a Samet on the defensive and acting in bad faith, highlight the sharp moral and political differences between them and the selfish and craven side of Samet, while touching on a wide range of ideas and tenets exposing the many dilemmas intellectuals and activists may have in the Turkey of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – while focusing on his characters Ceylan knows how to broaden the perspective, even if it means shooting sophisticated lines that may be over the audience’s heads. But then silence comes, unexpectedly, the fierce gaze of Samet seems to convey something else, the camera, set on a high angle, slides down and closes up the nape of Nuray’s neck – below the words something else is occuring. The characters then move to a couch, with the conversation becoming again tense, but on wholly different terms. And then comes the kiss: the need to hug someone, to love someone, to be with someone gets overwhelming. Samet does need, after all, to commit himself.
Yet it is not simple: comes the film’s most extraordinary moment, when Samet seems to get ready to go to Nuray’s bedroom but instead steps outside the movie set: the wall separating the frame of the fiction and the reality of life and of a real shooting is knocked down, and the last-minute angst of the character is now shared by the actor, his character’s stress and doubt overlapping the frame of fiction and contaminating our perception. The love affair would proceed as expected but the director has dared to delve so deep in his character as to alter the nature of framing. It is stupendous but not a first: earlier the film just froze as the moving pictures becoming photographs of the people Samet meets – he may dislike the area but he keeps looking at it with the artist’s eye. The film must then be viewed as a tool that can be tinkered with, tampered, even transgressed, as long as it can reach the truth of a character who himself struggles between the haughty rejection of a world he feels unfit for him and the inevitable need to live with other humans.
Compared to the rest of “Kuru otlar üstüne – About Dry Grasses”, the final part is a sea-change in climate (it is summertime), places (Samet, Nuray, and Kenan, visit an archaeological site), mood (they seem to get on well and be happy), and narration – Samet’s appeased voice-over can be heard at length as he ponders over what happened to him. The audience may better understand why he was so fascinated with Sevim, what he hoped and still fears, and slowly his narrative emerges as a moving, powerful expression of the melancholy life can force on a man and shapes the world. And as “Kuru otlar üstüne” gets reframed and rejigged for this stunning coda, this melancholy reveals itself clearly as the true meaning and real beauty of Celyan’s new feature.