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The latest existential epic from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) is a masterclass in moral and philosophical inquiry. Nestled away in snowy, isolated Anatolia, public-school art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) yearns to leave his sleepy village for cosmopolitan Istanbul. He finds a silver lining in Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a resolute fellow teacher who forces him to confront what he can’t readily accept. Using hypnotic long takes and other bold formal techniques to convey the murky motives of its Dostoevskian protagonist, About Dry Grasses proves Ceylan to be one of cinema’s most incisive investigators of the human condition. Available October 22

INCLUDES
Meet the Filmmakers, a new interview with director Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Trailer

Kudos to Ceylan for joining the Chantal Ackerman Masterpiece Club.

I wouldn't say I liked this as much as Winter Sleep, but this was a fantastic movie. Such a rich tapestry of small-town motifs at a meditative pace. Ceylan is one of the best contemporary filmmakers working right now. I still haven't see The Wild Pear Tree and need to remedy that soon.

About Dry Grasses is expiring from the Criterion Channel at the end of April. I never expected any of the Janus Contemporaries titles to ever rotate off streaming; I wonder if Janus got the rights to it under certain conditions.

This is a bit of a step down from Ceylan’s last few films due mostly to over familiarity. In recent years ‘teacher gets falsely accused’ has become a genre onto itself and I’ve yet to see a film successfully pull it off. This film fairs best of the lot in part because the teacher in question is quite unlikable which creates this complicated audience relationship and also because of how incidental to the overall tapestry it can be. The length here is a real benefit as the hour of set up really makes the tragedy more effective than pure plotting will allow. Ceylan’s theatrical ambitions also continue to help as the long scenes of vocal sparing collate into a depth beyond the actual story which I can’t emphasize enough does not work well on its own.

I really wanted to like this one more, but Ceylan's signature investigative talks -that often realistically peel back layers of a person's history and selfhood, as in Winter Sleep- here come largely in a somewhat superfluous B-plot involving Merve Dizdar, who does her best trapped within. I get what the scenes are trying to do, and I do appreciate how they tense up the last hour, but the conversations' directness unveils a shallow area of investigation rather than an infinitely rich one. And that's not because biopsychosocial examinations are more interesting than sociopolitcal ones, but because the philosophical debate doesn't leave organic elisions to confront. In Winter Sleep, the characters and their tragic circumstances are gray and complex, while here they're still sorta pitched that way, but then predominately cast aside to make way for a series of unearned wins and transformations. I hate to say it, but I feel like I needed another hour to really get on board with whatever Ceylan was trying to do with his tone in the last act

I was quite underwhelmed by this overall. It's beautifully shot and the performances are excellent, but the epilogue and a -- shall we say.... interesting decision -- following an extended dinner conversation (which was my favorite scene in the film), along with an entire subplot involving an unemployed guy in the village and a shop owner, all strike me as totally unnecessary. I should say, the epilogue likely was meant to be of profound depth (it's in the title of the damn film), but it feels rather superficial and pretentious instead. Shooting for something like In the Mood for Love and missing by a wide margin.