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About Dry Grasses Movie Review

About Dry Grasses is a 2023 Turkish drama film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and starring Deniz Celiloglu and Merve Dizdar. It’s yet another strong outing from this very interesting filmmaker.

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A young teacher hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after four years of mandatory service in a remote village, but is accused of inappropriate contact by two students. After losing hope, a colleague offers him new perspectives on life. With this movie Ceylan returns to the wintry Anatolian setting after his seminal ‘Winter Sleep’. That film was overall stronger, but this is still one of his best works, a film that is thought-provoking and fascinating in some of its themes.

As is always the case with this filmmaker, this is another three-hour long film that is staggering in its length for sure, but it’s a testament to his strengths as a storyteller that you don’t feel that length too much. Although I found the first half inferior and nowhere near as interesting as that compelling second half, it was still a necessary setup for everything that came afterward.

Ceylan is a very dialogue-driven director, highly novelistic is his approach to storytelling. This is yet another of his features that focuses throughout on not just extensive dialogue, but discussions that last for quite a long time and are pretty encompassing in the number of themes and ideas that they dealt with.

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The movie is all about feeling lost in a smaller town and how ultimately these communities are different from more urban ones that lack the humanity and warmth that characterizes smaller communities. The movie also hints at how complicated our emotions are and how sometimes we are driven by our emotions instead of our brains. The film is quite complex in its depictions of implications and projections being just as important as people’s actions.

Yes, the main character in About Dry Grasses is quite insufferable. He’s a deeply unlikable man and the film suffers a bit by having such a protagonist at its center. Still, he represents so many people who live in smaller towns and look down on others, dreaming of life in the big city. Some of his traits were relatable to me personally, even if I found him to be very annoying. The movie through him explored arrogance and how it can affect himself and others around him.

Deniz Celiloglu is very good in the main role, but it is Merve Dizdar who stole the movie from him in such a terrific, layered and moving performance that rightfully brought her an award at Cannes. The film is mostly centered around these two people and the little girl caught in the ambiguous actions of the main character. It was at its best when it focused on the discussions between the Dizdar and Celiloglu characters. Ceylan once again directed the film with a lot of style and his script is complex and brilliant. There is also the superb cinematography that captures so many emotions during its long shots while the editing is also quite strong for such a long film. I wished for a more engaging first half, but that second half was unbelievably good.

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