About Dry Grasses review – rich, engrossing Turkish epic with a twist

A village teacher is accused of inappropriate behaviour in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s handsome, beautifully performed, three-and-a-half-hour fable

When we first glimpse schoolteacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), he’s little more than a sooty smudge in the wide, white snowscape of a bitter Anatolian winter. Spilled out of a minibus after a holiday, he registers displeasure with every heavy step through the blizzard as he returns to a place he describes repeatedly as a hellhole. Thick snowfall blurs the edges of his advancing figure, which takes an unexpectedly long time to take on a solid, three-dimensional form. Such unhurried pacing prevails for nearly three-and-a-half hours in this Turkish-language arthouse epic, the latest from festival heavyweight and 2014 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It’s an approach familiar from his previous pictures, such as Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, as a portrait of Samet is built by increments, slowly revealing his complexities and calculations. And what a thoroughly reprehensible individual he turns out to be.

About Dry Grasses unfolds in a region renowned for its beauty, something the film’s elegantly composed widescreen cinematography emphasises throughout. Samet, though, is immune to its charms. Assigned by the government as an art teacher to a rural backwater school, he’s counting the months until the mandatory four years in the job have been completed and he can request a transfer – he has his eye on a post in Istanbul. In the meantime, he enjoys the minor celebrity his city background affords him, accepting offers of tea and cynicism from everyone from the local army captain to shady underworld figures. With his closest friend and roommate, fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), Samet affects a tone of jaded resignation that just about passes for wry humour.