Review of About Dry Grasses / Kuru Otlar Üstüne, directed by Nuri Bulge Ceylan

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This is another one of those blog posts where I’m revisiting movies I watched a while ago. I’m typing this in December 2024; I have a huge backlog of blog posts to get through these days, hence the need to space out these posts. It’s a lot of work!

I watched About Dry Grasses a little over a year ago at the time of typing this. I was working as a film critic at MovieWeb during this time, and I had been sent to the New York Film Festival. This was one of the movies I was attending the press screenings for, and I saw how quickly the Walter Reade Theatre filled up.

After all, it is a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, so the people were going to show up! This movie clocks in at a whopping 2.5 hours though, so it certainly is something you need to wear comfortable clothes for and get a snack if you see in theaters. The length I started feeling about three hours in.

But I recently got a Criterion subscription again and decided it was time to revisit the movie, as it was an exclusive to the American Criterion platform. And that was how I ended up putting myself through the 3.5 hours again.

Let’s get into the review and summary! I know there’s a lot of ground to cover with this movie, so I don’t want to bore you with the more mundane details.

Sent to a remote village in Anatolia, a teacher gets himself into trouble and love triangles.

For this movie, I’m not going to give an entire comprehensive summary, or else I’m going to be here all day. I don’t think a lot of the mundane moments need to be included as well, as this is a movie that moves pretty slowly and takes its time. It’s very much grounded in reality and realism, giving us a chance to become absorbed into the games our protagonist is playing.

Speaking up our protagonist, in this movie it’s Samet. He’s a teacher who used to live and work in Istanbul, but he has been sent by the education board to a village in Eastern Anatolia. There’s literally nothing here, and in the winter the snow goes on for miles/kilometers, leaving the villagers at the mercy of nature.

Samet is very resentful of the fact he was sent here, but when the holidays end and the winter term begins, he finds out his coworker-slash-roommate Kenan and he have been accused by two female students of being inappropriate. One of the students is a prominent one in this story: Sevim.

As we see throughout the course of the movie, Samet kind of takes on a mentor role for Sevim. The girl seemingly kind of has a crush on him, and he feeds into in some ways. It’s a bit uncomfortable to watch happen in real time, and when she feels slighted by him and rejected by her beloved teacher, it leads into the scenario where she helps report him for being inappropriate with students.

We dawdle through that storyline for a bit, and see how Kenan and Samet are trying to defend themselves in this situation. It’s a remote village too, so it’s not like there are a ton of people for the rumor to pass around. Everybody knows.

The other big storyline in this movie, which shows the blurry lines between Samet’s morality, is between him, Kenan, and a teacher in a nearby village named Nuray. Nurary is a victim of a terrorist attack and lost a leg, which is a talking point as the trio gathers.

Eventually, though, Samet learns that Kenan has romantic feelings for Nuray. This sparks some weird competitive edge in him, and he decides he needs to have Nuray for himself. So Samet begins pursuing her romantically as well, even though it’s shown he had no interest in her at all before.

And in the end, he’s kind of successful in winning over Nuray, leading him to seem even more like a terrible person through all of this. I really did not like Samet as a protagonist, but I can see why we focus on his story. It shows that some people create their own misfortune, and when the winter ends, there is only dry grass all around him.

Overall Thoughts

It’s certainly a Ceylan film, that’s for sure. I like his movies a lot, especially when it comes to how he wants to depict Turkey and its contemporary issues on-screen. I don’t know if I would return to this movie again, but the fact I did end up returning to it once in two years is a sign of its quality.

I think this is a movie for someone who is interested in film as a medium of representing reality, or docufiction. It’s not based on a true story (as far as I know of), but it certainly feels like it’s dawdling through a man’s life as he grows through some major moments.

Do I agree with his actions? No. There’s some dark humor scattered in that got some laughs, but I remember when I went to the bathroom after the movie the other journalists and media were chatting about how they liked it. This is a movie that says something about humanity and the way we live our lives.

Go watch it if you haven’t seen the movie and are interested. Maybe you’ll find it worth it!

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