About Dry Grasses (2023, Nuri Bilge Ceylan) (Patreon)

56/100

Feeling a bit bait-and-switched. For a good long while—maybe the first hour of a film that runs well over three—Ceylan's latest gives the appearance of having an unprecedented (for him) dramatic focus. Specifically, it looks very much as if he's remade Vinterberg's The Hunt, transforming it from a straightforward tale of community persecution into something much more fraught and ambiguous. Alarm bells go off the first time we see Samet with one of his students, a bubbly teen named Sevim, even though nothing particularly untoward happens; thereafter, every scene involving Sevim tied my stomach in knots, culminating in the most quietly devastating confrontation I expect to see this year: a mortified young girl repeatedly and politely asking her teacher to return the love letter that was confiscated from her in class (not by him, long story), while he repeatedly and falsely claims to have already torn it up without reading it. Now, Ceylan gonna Ceylan, so this harrowing narrative (which results in a complaint being filed against him and another teacher, who happens to be his roommate—one of the many aspects that makes this far more interesting than was The Hunt) shares screen time with various other fascinating details of Samet's life in this currently frozen Anatolian backwater, out of which he's desperate to transfer. All of which initially add welcome texture and intriguing counterpoint, rather than serving as any kind of distraction. Eventually, though, the complaint gets (shadily) resolved, Sevim drifts out of the movie (Samet's cruel revenge against her is Dry Grasses' final truly great moment), and Samet becomes another of Ceylan's smugly clueless assholes, engaging in lengthy heated tortured debates straight out of Winter Sleep's most exhausting stretches. The longer the film went on, the less engaged I became; at one point, something genuinely startling and inexplicable occurs, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you why it occurs or what it's meant to signify, and have yet to encounter a cogent theory on that subject. Closing voiceover narration, while perhaps intended ironically (given who's speaking, plus the way that it shows up out of nowhere in a movie that had been narration-free for over three hours), still comes across as "Maybe the dry grasses were really the hopes we shriveled along the way." I've been a fan of Ceylan's unemphatic discursiveness (and his shots of people endlessly trudging through snow) since Distant, 20 years ago...but just this once, a more conventional, tension-filled story would've been nice, especially since it was right there.