mancusoMINI: About Dry Grasses
The Turkish film is needlessly long and disappointingly stretched-thin
mancusoMINI is a series of short-form reviews for new films that I saw but that are beyond my primary review slate (or I just didn’t have enough time to write a full review).
“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” Such were the immortal words of Roger Ebert, who (obviously) never lived to see Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, a 197-minute Turkish language film that struggles to justify such a lengthy runtime. My flippant opening isn’t to suggest that Ceylan’s film is bad by any means, but it perfectly represents a corollary to Ebert’s perspective: a movie should be as long as it should be. Some of my favorite films are of comparable length, but About Dry Grasses is painfully slow and, like the Turkish town where the film takes place, is filled with empty space between its most important points. There is certainly value in a methodically-paced narrative, but Ceylan perhaps asks too much for the viewer, both in its breadth and in its unlikable central character Samet, a cynical school teacher who develops strange relationships with students and undermines those “closest” to him. The film presents an interesting exploration of a flawed man who desperately wants to belong, an amoral drifter who rejects ideology yet secretly longs for the psychological and spiritual comfort ideology can bring. That’s all well and good, but the film feels more like a portrait of such a man rather than a compelling narrative; its first act slowly but surely builds some momentum, but this rising action plateaus and Ceylan’s interests drift elsewhere. To be fair, such methodical direction does have its benefits, and he gives his actors the breathing room to derive naturalistic performances out of naturalistic dialogue exchanges (some of which may very well have been improvised). But gorgeous visuals of impressive vistas can only take you so far - there’s an incredible 150-minute movie in here somewhere, but like Samet, it just can’t seem to break free of the idea of what it wants to be.
