About Dry Grasses
2023, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
A little over halfway through About Dry Grasses, Samet visits his veterinarian friend Vahit during a blackout. At the end of their conversation, Vahit tells how he had “cured two cows for this one guy. Then he came and shot my dog.” “Why,” Samet asks him, and the vet replies, “Because he’s human.” Vahit’s answer could be taken either as a charitable acknowledgement of the shooter’s humanity, or as a bitter generalization of human beings. The same contradiction defines Samet – a man who eagerly agrees that his “worst trait is excessive compassion,” yet whose vanity constantly interferes with his good will.
Two parallel stories form the plot of About Dry Grasses, and Samet’s vanity looms large in each. One concerns his inappropriately affectionate relationship with his seventh-grade student Sevim, and the other concerns his relationship with Nuray, an English language teacher at a neighboring school. Each is a story of secrets, lies, betrayed trust, and ambiguities. The greatest ambiguity is at the end – does Samet learn from his experiences?
In the case of his student Sevim, Samet has gone so far that his other students call him out for favoring the girl. There is nothing overtly sexual in their relationship, and although her accusation is correct – he did once put his arm around her shoulder – it was for exactly one second, apparently an instinctive reciprocation of her own hand on his back, and he evidently thought better of making the gesture. It’s entirely plausible that he forgot it. Nevertheless, when he begins reading her love letter, then denies holding it, then tells her of his own childhood crush on a literature teacher, then later stares at Sevim standing with a male classmate, there’s a strong insinuation that he had taken some delight in fancying that the letter was directed at him.
A similar vanity drives the other plot. After first meeting Nuray, he matches her with his roommate Kenan, believing correctly that they’d be a good fit. A flurry of incidents, however, provokes Samet’s vanity, leading him to show up alone at Nuray’s apartment and sleep with her. First, when he and Kenan join Nuray in a restaurant, she takes an intense interest in Kenan’s face, even asking Samet to move out of the way so she can photograph Kenan. Second, when physical education teacher Tolga suggests that the students’ accusation was directed mainly at Kenan, Samet first expresses relief then calls Kenan “a rat”. Lastly, after spying Kenan and Nuray together in town, Samet probes his roommate about their date, to no avail.
Right before Samet goes to bed with Nuray, the film shifts gears. In a nearly two-minute tracking shot, Samet turns out the living room lights then opens what seems to be a bathroom door, except it’s not – it takes him outside the film set into a vast studio space where other crews are going about their business. Such ruptures of the “fourth wall” are nothing new in cinema, but it’s startling here because the film has thus far used convincingly real locations, many of them outdoors. What viewer would have imagined those busy production spaces beyond Nuray’s hallway? Breaking the “fourth wall” is customarily a gesture of honesty, a “coming clean” on the filmmaker’s part, admitting that it’s “only a movie”. Still, the fourth wall isn’t completely broken here. Samet stays in character, and the passing extras never acknowledge the camera following him. This formal gesture of honesty calls attention to another “coming clean”. Samet’s destination is a real bathroom, where he looks intently into the mirror and swallows a pill, presumably an erection enhancer. Given everything else we’ve seen, the implication is that he has no great passion for Nuray. He’s thinking not of her but of himself.
This self-centeredness fits with Samet’s vanity, but on reflection it also has everything to do with his preceding eleven-minute political argument with Nuray. Their contention begins on the topic of leaving for Istanbul: “You have to think about your own life,” Samet tells her. “Life will take care of itself,” she replies, but his answer sums up his attitude: “I’ve done my share. Others can do theirs.” On the surface, his wish to avoid belonging to any “-isms” may sound reasonable, until we realize that their whole argument contrasts her wish to belong to society against his solipsistic individualism.
Rather than letting either character win the argument, and thus reducing its point to words, the film puts the question in the context of life, settling it cinematically over three hours and eighteen minutes. Nevertheless the end of the dinner makes the film’s position known. As Nuray and Samet fall silent, three successive shots align their heads in syzygy formation, and on the third, Nuray’s head eclipses Samet’s. The film will take her side.
In taking sides, however, it’s important that the film maintains an ambiguity in Samet’s motives, thus keeping its thumbs off the scale so the viewer can assess him fairly. Samet is an art teacher, and although he’s given up drawing, he’s still an active photographer. His pictures sum up the paradox in him: they’re sensitive portraits that put their subjects at the center, but their evident artistry is a potential source of vanity. Although Samet is sometimes cruel to Kenan, to Savim, and to his students, he’s no sadist. He’s introduced bringing a gift of olive oil to Kenan, and the recurring image of dogs – in Vahit’s story, in front of the school, on the streets of Nuray’s town – is always associated with his compassionate nature, even if he never acts to help the dogs. He exhorts Vahit to “do something” for the mangy dogs outside, and he teases Nuray for ignoring a stray dog outside the bank. Samet’s inaction is consistent with his arguments in Nuray’s dining room.
All this is more than a character portrait or a moral argument. Without calling excessive attention to its national placement, About Dry Grasses is full of signs pointing to Türkiye as a nation. Topographic and administrative maps of the country hang on the school walls. There are Turkish flags here and there, and Samet’s flashlight falls on a bust of Atatürk in the school corridor. Samet photographs Mount Ararat near their village, the country’s highest peak and a symbolic landmark. The characters represent a broad swath of Turkish society, from the cosmopolitan to the provincial, from the military to a Kurdish rebel to Alawites. If the film is an argument against Samet’s individualism, then its point is relevant almost anywhere, but it’s also likely that Ceylan saw some particular relevance within Turkish society – that the good intentions of ordinary citizens like Samet are hampered by the kind of spirit that says, “I’ve done my share. Others can do theirs.”
Samet begins one of his art classes with a lesson on perspective. He has his own ulterior agenda in the scene, but questions of perspective run through the whole film, as they do through Türkiye’s divided society, through schoolhouse accusations, and through the eternal conflict between individualism and collective action. About Dry Grasses is a search for truth, and it doesn’t wait long to make progress. When Samet visits army headquarters (after lying to his Kurdish friend that he wouldn’t go there), a sergeant and a subordinate are talking past each other. After asking “Did I ask you that?” three times, the sergeant loses patience:
“Answer my fucking question!”
“Yes, sir, I always was.”
“What were you, Erdi?”
“A lazy fucker, sir.”
“Good job, you told the truth. Go get us tea.”
The sergeant then turns to Samet: “I love when a man tells the truth. Really. He’s a great kid.” The first step in the film’s quest is to reject this militaristic notion of truth. Truth cannot be a forced agreement; it has to be reached without the interference of power. The scene is echoed near the end when Sevim brings a slice of cake to Samet, and the teacher tries to elicit a confession from his once-favorite student. Like his sergeant friend he tries to straighten her out: “That’s not what I asked. Consider the question again,” and as if to remind us of the earlier scene, he tells her, “Don’t stand there like a soldier.” Samet is pulling rank on Sevim, and although he seeks understanding, it’s his vanity, not his compassion, that demands it.
At the end, therefore, when he reflects on Sevim on the hill above the ruins, it should be no surprise that Samet has failed to understand her. He acknowledges her otherness in the “abyss” between them, yet he still comes around to seeing himself in her as he imagines her future: “Time will pass, and if you survive in this land of unending setbacks, you will still turn yellow and dry up in the end. You will find yourself at the midpoint of your life, and see you’ve gained nothing but the desert inside you. Nothing else.” “The truth”, as he tells himself, “is as brutal as it is boring.”
Nothing more is said after Samet’s monologue comparing Sevim to the dry grasses around him (which he also identifies with), but just then a gray and yellow bird catches his attention, chirping and flitting over the like-colored grasses. The landscape he had seen as bleak, and the “worthless” grasses, are surely not bleak or worthless to that bird, and Samet’s sympathy for animals gives him an opening here to look at his experience, the people he’s met, and the place he’s running away from, differently.
About Dry Grasses is a story of ironies. Samet is supposedly a modern and cosmopolitan man, stifled in the eastern province where he’s been assigned for four years, yet his outlook is narrower than that of the people around him. He’s a kind man who behaves unkindly. His students represent the future of Türkiye, yet he sees no future for them except to “plant potatoes and sugar beets so the rich can live comfortably.” Only at the end, among ancient ruins, surrounded by the country’s distant past, does he show possible signs of imagining a brighter future.
CONNECTIONS:
L’eclisse – Sustained attention to the limitations of human perspective
Blow-Up – Story of a photographer who may finally learn to see; structural ironies
Solaris – Meditative shots of pictures on the wall; visual allusions to Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Passenger – Argument against its protagonist’s own bleak vision
The Day He Arrives – Ends on a possibly self-aware close-up of a man whose outlook has been distorted by vanity