In far-flung Anatolia, reluctant blow-in Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) takes beautiful photographs of locals against wintry tableaux and counts the days when he can return to city life.
Some four years into his posting on the eastern Anatolian steppe, the art teacher’s aesthetic sensibilities are at odds with his thrillingly awful personality.
He keeps in with the military, the local boss and his roommate and fellow teacher, Kenan (Musab Ekici). He’s especially popular with Sevim (the remarkable newcomer Ece Bağci), a coquettish preteen student he inappropriately favours.
His unprofessional pats and a small gift are overlooked until a love letter from Sevim’s diary is confiscated. Samet, imagining himself as the muse, refuses to return the billet-doux. An outraged Sevim and another student make retaliatory allegations against Samet and Kenan. Samet’s subsequent escalation of hostilities against his young students is painful, amplified by knowing the substance of the charges. “You’ll plant beets and potatoes so that the rich can live comfortably,” he rages in class.
His friendship with Kenan becomes strained when they compete for Nuray (Merve Dizdar, named best actress at Cannes for her performance in 2023). She’s an English teacher Samet ungallantly rejects until he realises he has a romantic rival.
Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous Anatolian Cannes winner, adapted the novella The Wife by Anton Chekhov and a subplot of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. About Dry Grasses, similarly, feels like a great, lost work of Russian literature. Its cinematographers, Cevahi̇r Şahi̇n and Kürşat Üresi̇n, provide the epic, snowy Chekhovian visuals.
Samet’s longing to escape his government-mandated teaching service in a forbidding environment might be understandable, but his bitterness and isolationism are harder to square.
A verbose stand-off between Samet and Nuray, during which she rightly notes that the figurative greener pastures of Istanbul won’t fix his self-absorption, is a dense philosophical reckoning, culminating in a strange Brechtian flourish. The vigorous, masterful script, written by the director his wife and frequent collaborator Ebru Ceylan, counterpoints the extended runtime. The director says he could have made the film longer; remarkably, most viewers will agree.
