Film: “On Dry Grass”: Normally frustrated with life

If anything should characterize our trained lives as precisely as possible, then it is this scene from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s new film “On Dry Grass”: the teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), who teaches art at a school in the deepest eastern Anatolian province, asks his students asked who of them had ever been to the sea. Only four children come forward. Next he asks the class who can name five seas for him. All arms go up. Why is this seemingly banal classroom scene so meaningful? Because it shows what a society looks like that assembles people into precisely fitting particles in the system, like in a factory. But you should never trust them to gain their own experiences, let alone let them fail and learn from life itself. If you allowed that, they would ask too many questions instead of hacking into the computer at eight in the morning.

This school scene is also somewhat reminiscent of the fabulous dialogue that Robin Williams gives as psychiatrist Sean Maguire in “Good Will Hunting”: “If I ask you what you think about love, you’ll probably quote me a sonnet, but you have Never looked at a woman and felt completely defenseless.”

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And so Ceylan’s new film is about exactly that, the big picture: What is the good life and why is it so difficult for us to live it? The teacher Samet is just the projection surface for the normally jaded realist: He wants to be a good teacher, wants to inspire his students to do more and not force obedience through humiliation, but in the end he does it just like everyone else: when the children He gets loud when he asks childish questions. If they don’t immediately copy the still life from the blackboard that he tells them, he tells the young people that they will forever languish in their backwater planting potatoes. The wasteland has made him hard, although throughout the entire 197 minutes (phew) you can never be sure that Samet is not a misanthrope by nature, who just likes to blow up idealism with nice words, but is too cowardly, to act accordingly.

“On Dry Grass,” which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, is a three-hour film that demands a lot of attention, as there is almost non-stop talking between the beautiful landscape images. Sometimes banal, a lot of conflicting things and in a terrific dialogue between Samet and the fascinating Nuray (Merve Dizdar), in which they discuss responsibility and moral ethics in an almost proseminar-like manner (and both of them have their lips glued to each other the whole time). In short, this epic production is anything but boring arthouse nonsense that takes itself too seriously. But “On Dry Grass”, which is actually dedicated to Turkish conditions in the periphery, also tells a lot of universal things about people themselves. You just have to hold out for a long time, but that’s something you have in common with your own life.

The central figure is the teacher Samet, but he would only work half as well if it weren’t for his almost antagonistic roommate Kenan (Musab Ekici), who is much calmer and less misanthropic. They both fall in love with the same woman, the charismatic and, in a quiet way, super smart Nuray. But that’s just one of the film’s many puzzle pieces, one of the many vehicles for showing why people act the way they do.

Samet, and that’s the fascinating thing about the character, makes it very hard to like him. On the one hand, you can understand that life as a teacher who has been transferred as a punishment (he has to do compulsory service in the east of the country) is extremely boring for him because it drains all energy from his body, since monotony is the all-determining element of life in this barren, but beautiful nature. In the winter, people here still transport the hay from one place to another on antique wooden sleighs, there are more dogs than people on the main street and the veterinary practice is also the local dive bar where you sit at the table and have a chat. On the other hand, Samet is far too often only concerned with his own advantage and, over the course of the film, turns out to be a lonely grump driven by resentment who increasingly loses his confidence.

Above all, there is the certainty that when his official duties are over, he will disappear back to the mega-metropolis of Istanbul, where he believes the Holy Grail is located. In a beautiful dialogue, Nuray (Merve Dizdar won the Best Actress award for her performance in Cannes) peppers him with his almost unbearable arrogance and she asks what he actually expects there, because the problems are coming along around him. And the problems that Samet’s soul struggles with, as it becomes clear in the second third of the film, are not the oppressive village structures, but rather he himself.

At no point does “On Dry Grass” provide a story that is told to the end – allegations of abuse against schoolgirls appear in the middle of the film, which are not fully explained – rather, Turkish conditions (which, however, have general applicability when it comes to people) are discussed in snippets, but they never seem vaguely cobbled together, but rather create an almost holistic picture of Homo sapiens with all its optimism, vulnerability and fallibility. The film says almost nothing about warmth and feelings and that is perhaps the only drawback, or the sobering conclusion about life in the Anthropocene.

“On Dry Grass”: Türkiye, France, Germany 2023. Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With: Merve Dizdar, Deniz Celiloğlu, Musab Ekici. 197 minutes, start: May 16th.

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