197 min | NR | February 23, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films
Samet teaches art in a snowbound Anatolian village and wants out. A student’s accusation and a rival for the same woman corner a man who treats everyone as a means to an end. Nuri Bilge Ceylan watches him squirm through a long winter, and the squirming is the point.
Samet teaches art at a school in a remote village in eastern Anatolia. He is finishing mandatory state service and wants nothing more than a transfer to Istanbul. Snow buries the landscape for most of the year. A teenage student accuses Samet and his roommate Kenan of inappropriate conduct, and the accusation exposes the rot underneath Samet’s charm. Nuri Bilge Ceylan builds a film about a man who has decided that other people are instruments and then dares the audience to keep watching him. The real subject is cynicism and the comfortable lies a self-interested man tells to survive a place he despises.
Deniz Celiloğlu plays Samet as a man whose warmth is a tool he picks up and sets down. He flatters his favorite student Sevim and turns vicious the moment she threatens him. Celiloğlu lets the cruelty leak through the charm without ever raising his voice. Merve Dizdar plays Nuray, a teacher in the nearby town who lost a leg to a bombing and carries her politics without self-pity. Her long dinner argument with Samet is the center of the film, and Dizdar makes conviction look like exhaustion earned the hard way. Musab Ekici plays Kenan with a decency that Samet cannot forgive, and Ece Bağcı gives Sevim a wounded defiance that refuses easy sympathy.
Ceylan wrote the script with Ebru Ceylan and Akın Aksu, and they let scenes run until the characters say the thing they meant to hide. The dialogue holds for many minutes on faces in cramped, lamp-lit rooms while the storm presses against the windows. The camera frames the white Anatolian plains as a flat expanse that swallows people and intentions alike. Ceylan breaks his own illusion at one point and lets Samet walk out of the scene into the bare machinery of the production, a rupture that exposes the performance underneath the performance. He also stops the film to hold on still photographic portraits of the villagers, faces studied with a patience the characters never extend to each other. The control is total and never decorative.
Ceylan refuses to redeem Samet or to condemn him from a safe distance. The film sits inside his self-justification long enough that the audience starts to recognize its own. Nuray articulates a case for collective hope, and Samet answers with the individualism of a man who has given up on everyone including himself. The closing passage finally lets a season turn, and the dry grasses of the title become a verdict on what survives a hard life and what does not. This is a portrait of moral evasion rendered with such precision that evasion becomes legible as a way of life. Ceylan does not let his protagonist off, and he does not let the viewer off either.