InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
identities, and the changing face of Europe more broadly, they
can never truly belong to larger society.
As Kheìdidja explains, she never felt she belonged to her
husband’s world, and this was exacerbated when her
mother-in-law (Marie-Ange Geronimi) blames her for her son’s
death. This inability to thrive in the white world is repeated when
the family returns to Corsica. Jessica starts a relationship with
Gaia (Lomane de Dietrich), the daughter of Kheìdidja’s wealthy
employers, while Farah is antagonized, then befriended, by a
casually racist local boy (Jean Michelangelini). Corsini creates a
scenario wherein Kheìdidja, Jessica, and Farah are able to begin
new phases in their lives, but in the end they all return to the
family they know, the three of them against the world. Their
flirtation with European whiteness is tragic, nearly deadly.
Corsini seems to be attempting to examine the personal fallout
from various historical forms of oppression: racism, colorism,
classicism, and homophobia. However, simply touching on these
issues is not the same as producing an analysis. Homecoming
ends by curtailing cultural hybridity in favor of self-separation,
as if her characters’ desires for something larger are little more
than expressions of internalized colonial consciousness. In true
bourgeois fashion, Corsini depicts a multiculturalism defined by
tolerance and coexistence, which sounds fine until you realize
what that actually entails. We only encounter one another in
passing, and no one ever has to learn, grow, or change. —
MICHAEL SICINSKI
ABOUT DRY GRASSES
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
When first introduced in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s
latest feature, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher, has been
in the remote village of Icesu for four years. Posted there for
compulsory civil service, he has been looking to leave since the
moment he arrived — and by the end of the film, he will do so.
Before the school year is out, though, he will first be involved in
two overlapping dramas which constitute the bulk of the film’s
197-minute runtime. In the first, Samet and his
colleague-cum-roommate Kenan (Musab Ekı̇cı̇) are accused of
inappropriate conduct by two eighth-grade students, and come
close to losing their jobs. The situation is all the more surprising
to Samet when he finds out that one of the accusers is his pet
student Sevim (Ece Bağci), whose innocent crush on him
evidently sours when she catches him reading a love letter she
wrote, which was confiscated by another teacher. In the second,
Samet and Kenan get involved in a love triangle with Nuray
(Merve Dı̇zdar), a disabled fellow educator from a different
school, who lost her leg during a recent bombing.
Like Ceylan’s 2014 Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep, About Dry
Grasses works primarily as a character study of an arrogant man
desperately lacking in self-awareness, developed across lengthy,
combative conversation scenes. The difference in About Dry
Grasses is how these conversations unfold in relation to Sevim
and Nuray, respectively. Sevim, who goes unseen for a long
stretch following the initial accusation, becomes a kind of
structuring absence, a void onto which Samet can project not
just his anger at the situation, but also his more general
dissatisfaction with his lot in life. Nuray, for her part, is able to
directly confront Samet in conversation. The film’s centerpiece
scene — possibly the longest in the film — comprises an
intellectual face-off between the two, in which she challenges
his somewhat cynical worldview with her own. This difference in
treatment is reflected, too, in the dramatic structure. Samet’s
unusually friendly relationship with Sevim is there from the film’s
start — and though we see nothing more inappropriate than his
giving her a compact mirror, we are not privy to how their
relationship began and evolved. His interactions with Nuray, by
contrast, are contained entirely within the film’s timeline, and we
see his duplicity in dealing with both her and Kenan.
While Ceylan may never make a film under three hours again,
About Dry Grasses showcases his dramatic flair and control of
pacing even better than Winter Sleep. What remains difficult to
account for is the film’s shape and structure, particularly during
the longest tête-à-têtes. Ceylan’s knack for dialogue and his
consistent ability to elicit convincing performances from his
actors is not to be undervalued. Indeed, watching About Dry
Grasses, it occurred to me that Ceylan’s approach to revealing his
characters’ histories, in uncovering the layers of their behavioral
personalities, might be compared to that of Mike Leigh, except
with logy dialogue and speech patterns instead of action. The
comparison, though, only drives home how much more judicious
Leigh’s use of structure is — this despite the usual critical focus
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